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From Africa to Auschwitz: How German SouthWest Africa Incubated Ideas and Methods

Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in

Eastern Europe

Benjamin MadleyYale University, USA

The German terms Lebensraum and Konzentrationslager, both widely known

because of their use by the Nazis, were not coined by the Hitler regime. They were

minted years earlier in reference to German South West Africa, now Namibia,

during the first decade of the twentieth century, when Germans colonized the land

and committed genocide against the local Herero and Nama peoples. Later use of

these borrowed words suggests an important question: did Wilhelmine coloniza-

tion and genocide in Namibia influence Nazi plans to conquer and settle EasternEurope, enslave and murder millions of Slavs and exterminate Gypsies and Jews?

In 1951, Hannah Arendt postulated that European imperialism played a crucial

role in the development of totalitarianism and associated genocides.1 Yet, she

stopped short of tracing how colonialism influenced Nazi leaders and their

policies. Today, the colonial antecedents Arendt mentioned are finally receiving

attention. Sven Lindquist and Enzo Traverso are pioneers in the field and as Dirk

Moses has noted, ‘historians like Jürgen Zimmerer are on the case’.2 Indeed, in his

Colonialism and the Holocaust, Zimmerer claimed that, ‘colonialism providedimportant precedents’ for Nazi ‘genocidal thinking’.3 Moreover, he argued that,

‘the war waged by German imperial troops against the Herero and Nama . . .

constitutes an important connection between colonial genocide and the crimes of

the Nazis’.4 Isabel Hull has also noted similarities between German South West

African and Nazi annihilationist policies.5 This essay builds on previous scholar-

ship to establish the Second Reich experience in German South West Africa as a

crucial precursor to Third Reich imperialism and genocide.

european history quarterly

European History Quarterly Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications,

London, Thousand Oaks, ca, and New Delhi (www.sagepublications.com), Vol 35(3), 429–464.

issn 0265-6914. doi: 10.1177/0265691405054218

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http://ehq.sagepub.com/






German South West Africa was colonial, but not typically so. Its violent subju-

gation had as much in common with the Holocaust as with other colonial mass

murders and may be regarded as a transitional case between these two categories

of violence. What distinguishes the German South West African genocide frommost other colonial mass murders is the fact that the Germans in colonial Namibia

articulated and implemented a policy of Vernichtung, or annihilation.

Wilhelmine rule in German South West Africa was not the sole inspiration for

Nazi policies in Eastern Europe, but it contributed ideas, methods, and a lexicon

that Nazi leaders borrowed and expanded. Language, literature, media, institu-

tional memory, and individual experience all transmitted these concepts, methods

and terms to the Nazis. To explore the colony’s influence on the Third Reich, it is

crucial to first contextualize it within the profound racism and violence of othercolonial regimes in Africa. Next it is important to examine how German South

West African colonial policies, including the acquisition of Lebensraum, treat-

ment of the colonized as subhuman, and legally institutionalized racism were

communicated to and borrowed by the Nazis. This essay then examines how

genocidal rhetoric, annihilation war, and the use of concentration camps were

transmitted across time and adopted. The article concludes by exploring how

Hermann Göring, Eugen Fischer, and Franz Ritter von Epp served as human

conduits for the flow of ideas and methods between the colony and Nazi Germany.

Plunder and Murder in Colonial Africa

Comparing the German South West African genocide to similar events in

Southern Rhodesia, British Natal, the Belgian Congo, and Italian Ethiopia illus-

trates that while the articulation of an annihilation policy separates the Namibian

catastrophe from these other cases of mass theft and murder, the German South

West African experience was one of many violent colonial episodes that may have

inspired Nazi conquest and genocide in Eastern Europe.

The German flag was raised over Namibia in 1884. Settlers then trickled in,

and by 1903 the colony’s 4674 Germans outnumbered those in any other

Wilhelmine overseas possession.6 In January 1904, the Herero rose up against

German rule in an attempt to end their dispossession, impoverishment, and politi-

cal subordination. After five months of sporadic conflict, 1584 German soldiers

armed with machine guns and cannons decisively defeated the Herero at theBattle of the Waterberg.7 Commanding officer General Lothar von Trotha then

launched an explicit genocide program against the defeated nation, announcing:

‘I will annihilate the rebelling tribes with rivers of blood and rivers of gold.

Only after a complete uprooting will something new emerge.’8 Ultimately

European History Quarterly, .








40,000–70,000 Herero died; only 15,000–20,000 survived the war and subsequent

genocide.9 Alarmed by the treatment of their Herero neighbors, in October 1904

the Nama nation rose up against German oppression. By 1908 the German Army

had killed approximately half of the 12,000 to 15,000 Nama.10

Yet, the Namibiancatastrophe was not completely unique in colonial Africa. Nor was it the only

possible colonial inspiration for Nazi imperialism and genocide.

Beginning in 1893, Cecil Rhodes and his British South African Company stole

millions of acres of land and hundreds of thousands of cattle from the Mashona

and Ndebele peoples in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. When many of these

people challenged European rule in 1897, Rhodes’ forces killed thousands of men,

women and children.11 Some Europeans advocated destroying entire communi-

ties. On 29 March 1896, Rhodes’ ally Lord Jarvis wrote to his wife that ‘I hope thenatives will be pretty well exterminated . . . our plan of campaign will probably be

to . . . wipe them out . . .’, while in July he wrote to his mother, suggesting that,

‘. . . the best thing to do is to wipe them out . . . everything black’. In January 1897,

Lord Grey wrote describing the mood in the colony: even the missionary Father

Biehler felt ‘the only chance for the future of the [Mashona] race is to exterminate

the whole people, both male and female, over the age of 14!’12 Had Rhodes not

decided that funding such a war would be prohibitively expensive, Southern

Rhodesia might have become, like German South West Africa, a site of genocide.13

In 1906, dispossession, physical abuse, and oppression ignited the Bhambatha

Uprising against British rule in Natal, now a South African province.14 Colonists

then waged a two-year-long war that included sporadic massacres, such as the

‘mopping up’ of several hundred defeated warriors following the Battle of Mome

Gorge.15 Ultimately, the counterinsurgency led to the deaths of between 3500 and

4000 Africans in operations roundly condemned both in other provinces of the

future South Africa and in London.16 South African leader Jan Smuts called the

counterinsurgency ‘simply a record of loot and rapine’.17 British Colonial

Undersecretary Winston Churchill refused to award colonial troops Imperial

Medals for bravery, instead sarcastically suggesting copper medals stamped with

the decapitated head of Bhambatha, leader of the uprising.18

Some European policies killed so many Africans that they dwarfed the German

South West African genocide in scale. In the Belgian Congo, ten million Africans

were killed or worked to death in the European quest for ivory and rubber between

1885 and 1920.19

Joseph Conrad called it ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever dis-figured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration’.20 Fifteen

years later, between 1935 and 1939, Italians killed some 250,000 Ethiopians while

Italian Colonial Minister Alessandro Lessona imagined an ‘Ethiopia without

Ethiopians’.21 Contextualized within the mass dispossession and murder of other

Madley: From Africa to Auschwitz








Ratzel’s formulation of Lebensraum theory was closely connected to colonial-

ism and German South West Africa. In ‘Der Lebensraum’, Ratzel argued that ‘the

difference between . . . those populations that fail and those that advance lies in

spreading themselves . . . the areas of the failed groups lie torn apart, lawless, andpoor. Advanced populations, in contrast, find the best places . . . and . . . grow’ in

‘instance[s] of colonization’.26 When Ratzel advocated German colonies he often

mentioned Africa. According to Harriet Wanklyn, ‘Ratzel wrote with great atten-

tion to Africa [and] the fate of Africa as a great colonial territory’.27 ‘Der

Lebensraum’ does not explicitly refer to German South West Africa, but two facts

suggest that the essay was developed with the colony in mind. First, in 1892,

Ratzel wrote an article designating the colony as a great candidate for German

settlement.28 Second, as a geographer, Ratzel would have conceived of his 1901theory knowing that Namibia was Germany’s most populous settler colony.

Thus, when Hitler wrote about Lebensraum, in the 1920s, he was likely to have

been appropriating an idea developed with colonial Namibia in mind.

Ratzel built Lebensraum theory under the assumption that ‘superior cultures’

destroy ‘inferior cultures’ in battles for living space. In his 1891 Anthropo-

geographie he claimed that, ‘The theory that dying out is predestined by the inner

weakness of the individual race is faulty . . . the decline of peoples of inferior

cultures [results from] contact with culture.’ Europeans, a people of ‘culture’,would destroy ‘inferior’ peoples to acquire Lebensraum. To support his point he

cited population decreases among indigenous Australians, northern Asians,

Polynesians, North Americans, South Americans and Southern Africans.29 This

connection between acquiring Lebensraum and physically destroying the indige-

nous inhabitants of colonized lands would later undergird Hitler’s own linkage

between colonization and genocide in Eastern Europe.

Ratzel exerted considerable influence in Germany and on Hitler. In 1891, he

became a founding member of the pro-empire Pan-German League.30 In 1900, he

published an influential book advocating German naval expansion and he con-

tinuously published both academic and popular articles.31 Ratzel was thus able to

widely disseminate both his Lebensraum theory and his idea that Africans were

doomed to vanish in the face of European settlement. Ratzel directly influenced

Rudolf Hess, and through Hess, Adolf Hitler. According to Professor Karl

Haushofer, who repeatedly visited Hitler in Landsberg Prison, Hess read Ratzel’s

1897 Political Geography and discussed it with Hitler as the two were writingMein Kampf .32

When Hitler adapted Lebensraum to his own plans he built on foundations laid

in German South West Africa. Even before Ratzel had articulated Lebensraum

theory, settlers and their advocates were expressing and putting into practice









nearly identical ideas. German Chancellor von Caprivi endorsed the annexation

of Namibia by proclaiming to the Reichstag, in 1893: ‘it is now German territory

and must be maintained as German territory.’33 In 1889, German colonial military

commander Curt von François portentously suggested, ‘That the natives [have]a right to the land and [can] do with it what they like . . . cannot be contested by

talk, but only with the barrel of a gun.’34 With more diplomacy, Governor

Theodore Leutwein later wrote that, ‘the whole future of the colony lies in the

gradual transfer of the land from the hands of the work-shy natives into white

hands’.35 Commissioner for Settlement Paul Rohrbach reiterated this sentiment:

‘The decision to colonize in South West Africa means nothing else than that the

native tribes must withdraw from the lands on which they have pastured their

cattle and so let the white man pasture his cattle on these self-same lands’.36

Finally, a 1901 Deutsch-Südwestafrikanische Zeitung article agreed: ‘the land, of

course must be transferred from the hands of the natives to those of the whites,

[this] is the object of colonization in the territory. The land shall be settled by

whites. So the natives must give way and either become servants of the whites or

withdraw’.37 Probably without ever having read Ratzel’s works, Germans put

Lebensraum discourse into practice in German South West Africa, thus testing an

idea that Nazis later pursued by seizing and settling Eastern Europe.

Settlers and their advocates rationalized taking African land and wealth byclaiming inherent German superiority and martial necessity. Then, they sup-

ported these theories with force. It was the same simple, brutal logic Hitler

employed in Eastern Europe when he wrote of ‘the right to possess soil’, German

racial superiority, and acquiring Lebensraum ‘by the sword’.38 Nazis sometimes

even directly linked Lebensraum theory to the lost Wilhelmine colonies. For

example, according to the 1940 official biography of Bavarian governor Ritter von

Epp, ‘The fight for the re-winning of overseas German Lebensraum [began] when

Hitler and his movement came to power’.39

Some Nazis overtly mentioned German South West Africa when promoting

Lebensraum theory. Pro-Nazi author Hans Grimm celebrated the space he had

found during 14 years in South Africa and German South West Africa in his 1926

People without Space. The novel was a key element of Nazi Lebensraum propa-

ganda, selling 315,000 copies by 1935, and ultimately some 700,000 copies in

Germany.40 Writing as Nazi Party Colonial Policy Office chief, in 1934, von Epp

described German South West Africa simply as ‘Lebensraum’.41

Six years later,when asking, ‘Why did we go to South West Africa at all?’, he replied ‘because . . .

a growing people needed both room to expand and growing economic resources’.42

Adopted from Ratzel and the Second Reich, Lebensraum theory undergirded

Hitler’s grand vision and subsequent Nazi expansion. In Mein Kampf , Hitler









argued that, ‘the acquisition of new soil for the settlement of the excess [German]

population possesses an infinite number of advantages’.43 Hitler then went on to

reiterate repeatedly Ratzel’s claim that, ‘Only an adequate large space on this

earth assures a nation freedom of existence’.44

He also emphasized that the NaziParty, ‘must . . . lead this people from its present restricted living space to

new land and soil, and . . . must strive to eliminate the disproportion between our

population and our area’.45 For Hitler, as for Ratzel, it was crucial ‘to secure for the

German people the land and the soil to which they are entitled on this earth’.46 On

23 May 1939, Hitler further restated Ratzel’s thesis by claiming that obtaining

Lebensraum ‘is impossible without invading other countries or attacking other

people’s possessions’.47 Yet, Hitler did not receive the Lebensraum idea from

Ratzel alone. Germans had already invaded others’ land in Namibia, thus makingthe practice of Lebensraum theory part of a lived collective German experience.

Throughout the Second World War, Nazi leaders proclaimed Lebensraum a

prime objective. In an April 1940 press conference Propaganda Minister Joseph

Goebbels described his view of ‘the New Europe’ in a single word: ‘Lebensraum’.48

On 20 January 1942, at the Wannsee Conference, SS Intelligence chief Reinhard

Heydrich summarized the progress of the ‘Final Solution’ by linking extermina-

tion with the acquisition of living space: ‘We have forced them [the Jews] out of the

Lebensraum of the people.’49 Commanding German troops in occupied Poland,General Bock justified ‘otherwise uncommonly harsh measures towards the

Polish population of the occupied areas’ by emphasizing to subordinates the need

to ‘secure German Lebensraum and the solutions to ethnic political problems

ordered by the Führer’.50

Once land was taken, Nazis followed the German South West African eco-

nomic model by brutally subordinating indigenous resources to German purposes

in order to create the agricultural utopia described by Lebensraum theory.

Heinrich Himmler’s Generalplanost, or General Plan East, aimed to exploit

Eastern Europe for raw materials, energy, food, and labor even if the process

meant destroying local economies, uprooting communities, instituting slavery,

and murdering millions.

Although in Mein Kampf Hitler wrote that Germany’s ‘territorial policy

cannot be fulfilled in the Cameroons [a Wilhelmine colony in Africa], but today

almost exclusively in Europe,’ he later adopted the Lebensraum idea for Africa,

demanding ‘the return of all . . . former colonial territories’.51

Hitler wanted both torecreate Germany’s 1914 imperium and develop a vast Eastern European ‘living

space’. Hitler thus borrowed Wilhelmine Lebensraum policy and expanded it to

include Eastern Europe.









Colonized People as Sub-humans

German South West African colonists pioneered the implementation of a

Weltanschauung, later adopted by the Nazis, in which superior Germans ruledover sub-human non-Germans with brutality and slavery. This paradigm pro-

vided new ideas and methods for Nazi colonialism that were transferred to

Germany and to future Nazis by a variety of vectors, of which colonial literature

is one easily documented.52

In their books, colonists and government employees frequently advocated the

idea of superior Germans ruling over inferior Africans. In 1907, Theodore

Leutwein tried to justify German rule over Africans, writing of ‘the higher Kultur

of the Whites’, while missionary Heinrich Vedder wrote of whites’ ‘undoubted’racial ‘superiority’.53 Others went far beyond simply trying to rationalize German

subordination of Africans.

Some authors tried to justify extermination. In 1906, Captain Maximilian

Bayer wrote that God had ordained the Namas’ destruction. According to Bayer,

‘Our Lord has made the law of nature such that only the strong of the world have

a right to continuity, while the weak and purposeless will perish in favor of the

strong’. He then prophesied that ‘the day will come when the Hottentots [Nama]

will disappear, but it will not be a loss for humanity because they are all only bornrobbers and thieves, nothing more’.54 In 1907, colonial bureaucrat Paul Rohrbach

tried to use economics to justify exterminating the Nama: ‘From the point of view

of the economy of the country, the Hottentots [Namas] are generally regarded, in

the wider sense, as useless, and in this respect, provide no justification for the

preservation of this race’.55 Colonial Namibian literature thus exposed metro-

politan Germans to a new form of racism in which non-Germans had the right to

exist only in so far as they served Germans and in which some authors even

endorsed extermination.

Literature also introduced metropolitan Germans to routine brutality as part of

colonial rule. After the murder of Herero princess Louisa Kamana, Governor

Leutwein observed, ‘Everywhere people asked themselves if the whites then

had the right to shoot native women’.56 Others wrote in metaphors. In his 1905

memoir, former Judge H. Hanemann proclaimed of his time on the colonial bench

that, ‘a single drop of white blood was just as precious to me as the life of one of our

black fellow-citizens’.57

Brutality was sometimes depicted in photographs.Bayer’s 1909 book displayed naked and partially clad men, women and children

with the caption ‘Captive Hereros’. Another photograph featured a prisoner,

surrounded by German troops, held on a leash.58 Three years later, Erich von

Salzmann presented a two-page photographic spread depicting naked, emaciated









female African prisoners.59 In 1905, Conrad Rust’s memoir featured a photo of

three Herero men stripped naked and hanging dead from the branches of a tree.60

Perhaps most shocking, a 1907 war chronicle recorded that, ‘A chest of Herero

skulls was recently sent by troops from German South West Africa to the patho-logical institute in Berlin, where they will be subjected to scientific measure-

ments,’ before noting that, ‘Herero women have removed the flesh [from the

skulls] with the aid of glass shards’.61 Evidence of skulls being sent from the

colony to Germany was also communicated to Germans through a popular post-

card depicting German soldiers loading a chest with African skulls.62 In colonial

Namibia, Africans were routinely beaten, flogged, raped, and sometimes killed.

During the counterinsurgency, violence escalated far beyond the limits set by con-

ventional European martial modes. Colonial authors and photographers reportedthis brutality and introduced it into the German national discourse.

Just prior to the Herero uprising, Paramount Chief Samuel Maherero wrote,

‘All our patience with the Germans is of little avail, for each day they shoot some-

one dead for no reason at all’.63 There is no direct link between colonial Namibian

brutality and Hitler’s 13 May 1941 order legalizing the shooting of civilians in

the East by the Wehrmacht, but German South West African brutality had set a

precedent.64 Leutwein’s explanation of settlers’ attitudes toward the Herero could

easily describe Nazi attitudes toward Slavs: ‘the Europeans flooding intoHereroland were inclined, with their inborn feeling of belonging to a superior race,

to appear as members of a conquering army’.65 Colonial literature transferred

violent, racist concepts to Germany, thus eroding resistance to brutality and

providing ideas and methods that the Nazis later expanded.

Colonial authors also informed metropolitan Germans of the colony’s un-

official slavery system. In his 1912 bestseller, Paul Rohrbach wrote, euphemisti-

cally, that Africans must be ‘compelled to serve . . . in our African colonies [as] it is

obvious that the black must be the serving people’.66 Others were more direct. In

Gustav Frenssen’s 1906 novel, Peter Moor’s Journey to South West Africa, the

protagonist is at first shocked when he hears ‘soldiers, farmers, and traders’ advo-

cating the treatment of Hereros as ‘slaves without legal rights’, but quickly con-

cludes that ‘they are not our brothers, but our slaves’.67 Behind closed doors, some

Germans were just as explicit. In 1904, Army General Staff Chief Alfred von

Schlieffen advocated keeping black Namibians ‘in a state of forced labour, indeed

in a kind of slavery’, while in 1907, a Swakopmund civil servant described thecolony’s Africans as ‘Sklaven’ or slaves.68

In parallel thinking perhaps derived, in part, from colonial Namibia, Nazis

later described Slavs as Sklaven, whose right to life hinged upon their utility to

Germans. In 1939, Hitler said he wanted Poles to become ‘cheap slaves’.69









Following this lead, the Nazi Governor of rump Poland, Hans Frank, proclaimed

that the region ‘shall be treated like a colony . . . the Poles will become the slaves

of the Greater German Empire’.70 Then, on 17 September 1941, Hitler made a

broader claim: ‘The Slavs are a mass of born slaves, who feel the need for amaster’.71 In a speech to SS generals on 4 October 1943, Himmler expanded on this

theme. He spoke of non-Aryans as slaves, and like Rohrbach, emphasized that

their right to exist depended upon service to the Volk: ‘Whether nations live in

prosperity or starve to death interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves

for our Kultur’.72 Nazi Reich Commissioner for the Ukraine Erich Koch fre-

quently referred to Ukrainians as ‘white Negroes’ and spoke of waging colonial

war in the Ukraine ‘as among Negroes’.73 Living under his rule, one Ukrainian

woman wrote in her diary, ‘We are like slaves’.74 Nazi policies toward Slavsretraced German South West African patterns. However, with their emphasis on

enslaving all Slavs, killing millions of others, and exterminating all Jews, Nazi

plans were even more draconian and ambitious.

Legally Institutionalized Racism

Parallels between German South West African and Third Reich race laws indicate

that the colony’s legal system provided conceptual and linguistic prototypesfrom which Nazi lawmakers borrowed extensively. Like the Nazis, Germans in

colonial Namibia embedded racism into their legal system. Leutwein noted that,

‘(r)acial hatred has become rooted in the very framework of justice’.75 Colonists

could legally beat African employees with whips and fists under the Väterliche

Züchtigungsrecht, or paternal right of correction.76 Even Herero Chief Assa

Riarua ‘was flogged until the blood ran’.77 Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-

century Germany was rife with discussion concerning the perceived dangers of

miscegenation and the notion of racial struggle. In German South West Africa

these ideas became German law for the first time. Concurrently, Germans in

colonial Namibia coined new racist concepts and introduced them to metropolitan

Germans while amplifying others already in circulation.

German South West Africa’s 1905 law banning Rassenmischung, or race mix-

ing, demonstrates how certain race laws and associated rhetoric were pioneered in

the colony, received wide exposure in Germany, and were then adopted by the

Third Reich.78

The ban on interracial marriage associated it with the new termRassenschande, meaning racial shame.79 Officials in other colonies followed colo-

nial Namibia and promulgated similar laws in German East Africa (1906) and

German Samoa (1912) that were, in the words of Lora Wildenthal, ‘unique in all

the European colonial empires of the day’. Then, in 1909, German South West









Africans promulgated a law punishing interracial marriage and cohabitation with

loss of suffrage.80

Namibia’s 1905 interracial marriage ban catalyzed a movement to institute

similar laws in Germany. Although never legislated into law, Reichstag debatesand press coverage brought the colony’s race laws and terminology under domes-

tic German scrutiny, amplifying their prominence in public discourse. Between

1905 and 1912, Reichstag members conducted repeated debates concerned with

Rassenreinheit [racial purity] and laws banning interracial marriage. During

these debates representatives spoke of Rassengefühl [racial feeling], Mischlinge

[mixed-race people], die Mischlingsfrage [the mixed-race question], and the

‘irreparable harm . . . racial mixing [causes to] our national consciousness’.81

Given Germans’ exposure to these terms and ideas, amplified by seven years of Reichstag debates, it is not surprising that Nazis deployed vocabulary nearly

identical to German South West African Rassenmischung laws and associated

Reichstag debates when they criminalized marriage and sexual intercourse

between Jews and ‘Aryan’ Germans. Linguistic connections indicate wholesale

borrowing. Hitler argued in Mein Kampf that introducing African blood into the

Aryan nation would ‘deprive the white race of the basis for its autocratic existence

by infecting it with inferior humanity’.82 The Nazi Party spoke of ‘racial defile-

ment’, and the Reich doctors’ leader Gerhard Wagner warned of ‘racial poisoningand pollution of German blood’.83 The term Rassenschande, first connected to law

in German South West Africa, provides a particularly close link between colonial

Namibia and the Nazis. Hitler spoke and wrote repeatedly of Rassenschande until

the term became standard Nazi propaganda parlance.84 Indeed, in noting how the

German South West African missionary Wandres termed interracial sex, ‘sinning

against racial consciousness’, Zimmerer observed, ‘it is not hard to recognize a

parallel with . . . the racial laws of the Third Reich’.85

German South West African race laws provided legal concepts later applied by

Nazi lawmakers. As in the colony, ‘Mischlinge’ became a topic of concern in the

Nazi Justice Ministry while both the 1935 Defense Law prohibiting soldiers from

marrying ‘persons of non-Aryan origin’ and the Nuremberg Laws criminalizing

marriage and sex between Jews and ‘Aryan’ Germans were simply variants of

German South West African laws against interracial marriage and cohabitation.86

In both colonial Namibia and the Third Reich, German lawmakers transformed

racism into legal discrimination, thus removing an important barrier to the mostsevere form of racial intolerance: genocide.









Genocidal Rhetoric

On 12 January 1904, Chief Maherero announced to the Herero people: ‘I fight.’ He

then commanded them to ‘kill!’87

Within days, 123 Europeans were dead.88

InitialHerero attacks on 267 German farms and businesses provoked war fever and

inspired murderous rhetoric among both colonial and metropolitan Germans.89

This oratory was then passed to the Nazis through political discourse and litera-

ture, serving as a crucial antecedent to genocidal Nazi thought and speech.

Annihilationist ‘cleansing’ rhetoric developed quickly in the colony. According

to one missionary, ‘The Germans are filled with fearful hate and a frightful thirst

for revenge, I must really call it a blood thirst, against the Hereros. One hears

nothing but talk of “cleaning up”, “executing”, “shooting down to the last man”,“no pardon”, etc.’ Likewise, the chief engineer of the Otavi Construction Com-

pany reported, ‘everyone here believes that the uprising must be smashed ruth-

lessly and a tabula rasa created’.90 Indeed, the commander of German troops in

Swakopmund telegraphed the German Foreign Office on 19 January 1904 to urge

that ‘the Hereros be dismissed, ruthlessly punished and a tabula rasa created’.91

A vengeful, genocidal rhetoric also arose in Germany. The German Colonial

Society publicly suggested that:

Anyone familiar with the life of the African and other less civilized non-

white peoples knows that Europeans can assert themselves only by main-

taining the supremacy of their race at all costs. Moreover . . . the swifter

and harsher the reprisals taken . . . the better the chances of restoring

authority.92

More portentously, on 17 March 1904 Reichstag delegate Ludwig zu

Reventlow questioned the Hereros’ very humanity in a speech admonishing his

fellow legislators: ‘Do not apply too much humanity to bloodthirsty beasts in the

form of humans.’93 Then, in 1906, the notion of creating ‘virgin territory . . . with

streams of blood’ became a rallying cry of the small German Social Party.94 The

press then amplified these ideas.

Annihilationist ideas and phrases also entered German public discourse via

memoirs and writing about the colony. Using an expression later associated with

the Holocaust, government geologist Doctor Hartmann wrote in 1904, that ‘the

“final solution” [Endlösung] to the native question can only be to break the powerof the natives totally and for all time’.95 As ominously, in 1907, Kurt Schwabe

titled the final chapter of his war memoir, ‘The End of the Herero People’. 96 The

same year Rohrbach wrote that, ‘To secure the peaceful white settlement against

the bad, culturally inept and predatory native tribe, it is possible that its actual









eradication may become necessary’.97 Later, in his 1912 best-seller, Rohrbach

wrote, ‘No false philosophy or race-theory can prove to reasonable people that the

preservation of any tribe of nomadic South African Kaffirs . . . is more important

for the future of mankind than the expansion of the great European nations’.Rohrbach even hinted at achieving ‘the extermination’ of Namibia’s ‘bushmen’.98

Nazi annihilationist rhetoric sometimes directly echoed German South West

African phrases and frequently connected annihilation with colonial goals.

Indeed, the Nazis’ blueprint for the East broadly replicated the colonization of

Herero lands. Nazis envisioned largely emptying the land of sub-humans to

create a vast Lebensraum. On this tabula rasa they planned to inscribe a new,

utopian social order, populated by Aryan farmers ruling over Slavic slaves.99

Following the 1904 uprising, Germans cleared Herero lands of people they con-sidered sub-human before enslaving survivors. In a further possible borrowing,

Nazis deployed a remarkably similar dehumanizing rhetoric to that used by

Germans in connection with colonial Namibia.

When zu Reventlow suggested that the Herero were ‘beasts in the form of

humans’, he articulated a concept that later became central to Nazi ideology and

genocidal thought: ‘Not every being with a human face is human.’ The phrase

appeared time and again in the speeches of Hitler and other prominent Nazis.100

Although its origins are obscure, the similarity between the two phrases suggeststhat Nazis may have borrowed this rhetoric from the Namibian genocide and

applied it to their own.

The centrality of Vernichtungskrieg, or war of annihilation, to both genocides

suggests an even more intimate connection between the two catastrophes. On 30

January 1939, Hitler publicly threatened European Jewry with annihilation: ‘If the

international Jewish financial establishment in Europe and beyond succeeds in

plunging the peoples of the world into yet another world war, then the result will

not be a Bolshevization of the globe and thus a victory for Jewry, but the annihila-

tion [Vernichtung] of the Jewish race in Europe.’ Nazi periodicals Der Stürmer

and Das Schwarze Korps routinely used the word ‘annihilation’; indeed it was

central to Nazi propaganda.101

Vernichtungskrieg

Historians regularly proclaim Hitler’s war in the East unprecedented in ferocityand scale. This is true. However, when one considers the genocidal wars fought

against the Herero and Nama, four striking similarities suggest that these

colonial campaigns incubated many elements of the Vernichtungskrieg later

waged by Nazi forces. First, German military leaders defined both conflicts as









Rassenkampf , or race war. Second, both armies articulated a Vernichtungskrieg

strategy predicated on physically destroying the enemy. Third, as part of this

strategy, German military leaders, in both wars, systematically murdered

prisoners of war (POWs) and civilians.102

Finally, in each case, leaders employedthe rhetoric of public health in attempts to rationalize mass murder. These ideas

and methods were communicated to Germany and future Nazi leaders through

speeches, the press, and colonial literature. As Zimmerer has suggested, ‘the

war against the Herero and Nama . . . was a step towards the National Socialist

annihilation war’.103

The idea of Rassenkampf underpinned German strategy in the Herero and

Nama wars, eroded restraint, and opened the door to military engagement with-

out limits under Hitler. As von Trotha prepared to assume command, the Kaiserordered him to ‘crush the rebellion by all means necessary’, thus implying that the

Herero were unworthy of protections afforded to European opponents.104 Von

Trotha then declared the Herero inhuman, proclaiming in the 2 August 1904

Berliner Lokalanzeiger that, ‘no war may be conducted humanely against non-

humans’.105 Soon thereafter, von Trotha and von Schlieffen both privately called

the conflict ‘racial war’ while, after the genocide, von Trotha publicly wrote of it as

a Rassenkampf .106

Von Trotha’s plan to ‘annihilate these masses’ was clear in his own mind, buthe and others made the policy explicit to all Germans.107 According to the 1906

German General Staff official history, ‘If . . . the Herero . . . broke through [at the

Waterberg], such an outcome of the battle could only be even more desirable in

the eyes of the German Command because the enemy would then seal his own

fate, being doomed to die of thirst in the Sandveld [Omaheke Desert]’.108 After

the battle, von Trotha announced his genocide policy in the 2 October 1904

Vernichtungsbefehl, or Annihilation Order:

All Hereros must leave the country. If they do not do so, I will force them

with cannons to do so. Within the German borders, every Herero, with

or without weapons . . . will be shot. I shall no longer shelter women and

children. They must either return to their people or they will be shot at.109

Prevented from escaping, thousands died in the desert. The General Staff history

described the Vernichtung strategy: the ‘waterless Omaheke was expected to

complete that which the German troops had begun: the annihilation [Vernicht-ung] of the Herero people’.110 The history went on:

The shutting off of the Sandveld, which was carried on for months with

iron firmness, completed the work of destruction. . . . The death rattle of the









dying and the shrieks of the maddened people – these echoed through

the solemn silence of eternity. The court had now concluded its work of

punishment.111

The Vernichtungsbefehl was publicly debated in Germany, reported in the press,and quoted in books like Conrad Rust’s 1905 war memoir.112 Through these con-

duits, future Nazi leaders received a new definition, Vernichtungskrieg: a military

doctrine advocating victory through the physical annihilation of the entire enemy

population.

Echoing German South West African strategy and rhetoric, Nazi leaders

defined their war in the East as both a race war and a Vernichtungskrieg. On 22

August 1939, Hitler spoke to senior military officers about the coming invasion of

Poland. According to Helmuth Greiner’s diary, Hitler proclaimed that: ‘The war

would be waged with the greatest brutality and ruthlessness and until Poland was

totally destroyed. The goal was not to occupy land but to annihilate all forces.’113

Then, in September 1939, Hitler told Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg and

General Wilhelm Kertch that the Polish war ‘would be . . . a brutal racial war

[Volkstumkampf ] which would admit no legal restrictions’.114 In March 1941,

Hitler announced to some 200 generals that the war against the Soviet Union

would be ‘a battle of annihilation’.115

According to Richard Overy, ‘The waragainst the Soviet Union was defined by Hitler as a Vernichtungskrieg’.116 The

practical result of this rhetoric was a radical departure from European rules of

martial conduct. However, while they killed on a scale never before seen in

German history, the Nazi Vernichtungskrieg tactic of murdering POWs en masse

was pioneered in German South West Africa.

Von Trotha’s troops regularly executed POWs. Leutwein wrote to the German

Colonial Department, five months into the conflict, to report that not a single

prisoner had yet been taken.117

Manuel Timbu, who served as von Trotha’sgroom, testified that, ‘I was for nearly two years with the German troops and

always with General von Trotha. I know of no instance in which prisoners were

spared’.118 Jan Kubas, who also served under von Trotha, simply noted, ‘The

Germans took no prisoners’.119

Metropolitan Germans learned of these war crimes from returning veterans

and colonial literature. Leafing through Erich von Salzmann’s 1912 war memoir,

readers would have come across a photo of a ‘mass grave at Owikokorero’; while

reading the General Staff’s war history they would have discovered that vonTrotha allowed his troops to execute ‘all armed men who were captured’.120 Even

German scientific books mentioned mass POW executions.121 Metropolitan

Germans also learned of their army’s abandonment of internationally recognized









rules of military engagement from Von Trotha himself. In the 3 February 1909 Der

Deutschen Zeitung, he argued that the war could not have been waged ‘according

to the laws of the Geneva Convention’.122 Although other German colonial forces

had killed POWs in earlier counterinsurgencies, they had never butcheredcaptured warriors on so large a scale or simply for belonging to a particular ethnic

group. The mass murder of Herero POWs signified a departure from German

military tradition, corroded German military morality and set precedents for even

more extreme behavior by Hitler’s Wehrmacht in Eastern Europe.

Nazis rejected international standards of martial conduct protecting POWs to

carry out their own, vast annihilation war. Under the 1941 Commissar Order,

German units moved into the Soviet Union with instructions to execute all

captured Communist party functionaries, both military and civilian. During thefirst six months of the invasion, over two million Soviet POWs were executed or

starved to death.123 Later, many were killed in slave labor, concentration and

death camps. In total, some 3.3 million Soviet POWs died in German captivity.124

According to a letter from Lieutenant von Beaulieu, quoted in the General

Staff’s 1906 war history, von Trotha forbade the killing of Herero women and

children.125 Yet, von Trotha’s troops murdered African civilians in great numbers

and no punishment ensued. After the Battle of the Waterberg, von Trotha chased

most of the Herero into the desert where stragglers were bayoneted, shot andburned alive en masse. According to one Bergdamara who fought with the

Germans, ‘We hesitated to kill Herero women and children, but the Germans

spared no one. They killed thousands and thousands. We saw this slaughter day

after day’.126 Timbu noted, ‘the soldiers shot all natives we came across,’ while

Kubas related how the Germans ‘killed thousands and thousands of women and

children along the roadsides’.127

Like von Trotha, Nazi leaders targeted civilians in order to clear the land. For

example, Hitler ordered his generals to ‘kill without mercy all men, women, and

children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain the living

space we need’.128 Even more broadly, Nazis planned to depopulate Soviet areas

intended for Aryan settlement from 75 million to no more than 30 million people,

anticipating the killing or removal of some 45 million Slavs.129 Thus, SS General

Erich von dem Bach-Zeleweski, head of Eastern European counterinsurgency

operations, fought partisans using tactics intended to ‘achieve Himmler’s goal of

reducing the Slavic population to thirty million’.130

Like German leaders in colonial Namibia, the Nazis made it clear that German

forces in Eastern Europe could kill civilians without fear of punishment. The so-

called ‘Barbarossa Decree’, much like the 1904 Vernichtungsbefehl, allowed

reprisals and protected Germans from prosecution in military courts for actions









against Soviet civilians.131 The aims behind the decree transcended military objec-

tives. On 16 July 1941, Hitler proclaimed to Marshal Göring, Chancellery Chief

Lammers, Nazi Party Foreign Affairs Chief Rosenberg and Armed Forces Chief

of Staff Keitel that in the Soviet Union Germans should seize ‘the opportunity toexterminate anyone who is hostile to us [since] naturally the vast area must be

pacified as quickly as possible; this will happen best through shooting anyone

who even looks askance at us’.132

To rationalize goals and methods that violated Christian morality and

European martial norms, German leaders in both colonial Namibia and Eastern

Europe deployed public health rhetoric. Although discussions of racial hygiene

and eugenics were common in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century

Germany, these linguistic overlaps suggest that rhetoric associated with GermanSouth West Africa was a source from which Nazis borrowed. In his diary, von

Trotha wrote, ‘Hereros, women and children, come in big numbers to ask for

water. Have given orders to chase them back by force, because an accumulation of

a big number of prisoners would constitute a danger to the provisioning and

health of the troops’.133 He then wrote to von Schlieffen, ‘I think it is better that the

[Herero] nation perish rather than infect our troops and affect our water and

food’.134 Accordingly, a German officer told Hendrik Campbell, who commanded

the Germans’ Rehobother Baster auxiliaries, to burn Herero women alive in theirhuts since, ‘they might be infected with some disease’.135

By trying to rationalize genocide as a response to a threat to German health,

von Trotha and his officers supplied a genocidal public health rhetoric that Nazis

seem to have appropriated. In a 1943 speech to SS officers, Himmler proclaimed

that, ‘Anti-Semitism is exactly the same thing as delousing. Getting rid of lice is

not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness’.136 Indeed, SS gas chamber

operators were called Desinfektoren, or disinfectors, in Nazi parlance.137 Propa-

ganda Minister Goebbels also used medical language to describe genocide: ‘Our

task here is surgical [to make] drastic incisions, or some day Europe will perish of

the Jewish disease’.138

In late December 1904, domestic pressure forced the German government to

retract the Annihilation Order. As early as March 1904, August Bebel criticized

the war against the Herero as ‘not just barbaric, but bestial’ while conservative

preacher Adolf Stoecker argued in the Reichstag that, ‘one may not judge the

Herero as beasts’.139

Karl Schrader, a left liberal, also argued in the Reichstag that,‘these people [the Herero] are also human’, while representatives of the Catholic

Center Party further attacked von Trotha’s tactics.140 The Kaiser responded to

these complaints by lifting the Vernichtungsbefehl. However, this only led to a

new phase of the genocide.









Concentration Camps

Many Herero survivors responded to the termination of von Trotha’s Annihila-

tion Order by returning from the desert and surrendering. Arriving home theyfound their dispossession completed: they no longer owned any land or cattle and

were legally prohibited from doing so; they were forced to become laborers

and could not travel without permission from whites.141 However, the theft did not

stop at land and cattle. First, thousands of surrendering Hereros, and later

Namas, were seized. Then they were taken, often in railway cattle cars called

Transport, to death and work camps where their lives were stolen.142

Nazis neither invented the concentration camp nor pioneered its use by

Germans. The first German concentration camps were built in colonial Namibiaand on 11 December 1904, Konzentrationslager, or concentration camp, was

introduced into the German language. Chancellor von Bülow wrote the word in a

letter commanding von Trotha to rescind the Annihilation Order and ‘establish

Konzentrationslager for the temporary housing and sustenance of the Herero

people’.143 Von Bülow likely borrowed the word and the institution from the

British, who had incarcerated Boer men, women, and children in barbed wire

compounds during the 1899–1902 South African War. The British in turn had

made use of the concentration camp concept developed by Spaniards in Cuba.144

After being further pioneered by von Trotha, two variants of these camps were

then adopted, again refined, and deployed on a massive scale by the Nazis.

Officially blurred together under the term ‘Konzentrationslager’, von Trotha’s

camps were unofficially divided into two categories: camps geared simply to kill,

and camps where prisoners were worked under conditions that routinely led to

death. Colonial Namibia’s death camp at Shark Island was different from Spanish

and British concentration camps in that it was operated for the purpose of destroy-

ing human life. Thus, it served as a rough model for later Nazi Vernichtungslager,

or annihilation camps, like Treblinka and Auschwitz, whose primary purpose

was murder. The second variant, German South West African work camps,

were also innovative: geared not merely toward incarcerating guerilla rebels and

potentially sympathetic civilians, as in Cuba and South Africa, their purpose was

to extract economic value from prisoners under conditions that camp administra-

tors anticipated would lead to mass fatalities. Thus, the Second Reich’s colonial

Namibian work camps provided a rough template for Third Reich concentrationcamps like Buchenwald and Dachau.

Operational from 1905 to 1907, Haifischinsel, or Shark Island, was the

twentieth century’s first death camp. Though referred to as a Konzentrationslager

in Reichstag debates, it functioned as an extermination center.145 Located on a bare









granite island in the cold fog of the South Atlantic, German troops referred to it as

Todesinsel, or Death Island.146 Like later Nazi death camps, the isolated killing

center’s location and operation were calculated to kill, beyond the public gaze, but

within proximity to the railroads used to deliver victims from distant regions. TheNazi death camps’ immediate, industrialized murder of most arrivals still lay

decades in the future, but Shark Island was operated with the intent to annihilate.

The difference was one of method and scale.147 Shark Island was more akin to Nazi

death camps than to Spanish or British concentration camps but was a transi-

tional institution between these early concentration camps and later Nazi death

camps.

More people died at Shark Island than at any other German South West

African concentration camp. Rape, malnutrition, beatings, inadequate housing,and minimal medical care in the face of typhus outbreaks destroyed the minds

and ultimately the bodies of African inmates. Others were simply executed.

Numerous witnesses attested to frequent deaths inside the camp. According to

Herero Chief Daniel Kariko, who visited in September 1905, ‘We had no proper

clothing, no blankets, and the night air on the sea was bitterly cold. The wet sea

fogs drenched us and made our teeth chatter.’ He went on. ‘The people died there

like flies that had been poisoned. The great majority died there. The little children

and the old people died first, and then the women and the weaker men. Noday passed without many deaths’.148 The Chronicle of the Community of

Lüderitzbucht provides a description from early 1906: ‘Approximately 2000

Herero POWs were interned on . . . Shark Island. . . . Daily the number of sick

increased. As many as 27 died each day’.149 On 6 October 1906, a missionary

named Laaf wrote to the Rhenish Mission Society in Germany and suggested ‘a

weekly estimate of 50 deaths’. Two months later he wrote again: ‘The mortality

. . . is frighteningly high. If it continues like this, it will not take long before the

entire community is killed off’.150 Casper Erichsen has concluded that, ‘at least

2000 people died on the small island’.151 The numbers may have been higher.

According to Fritz Isaac, some 3500 people were sent to Shark Island, but only 193

left when the camp closed in 1907.152 German authorities were well aware of what

was happening there. In December 1906, a Social Democrat named Ledebour

stood before the Reichstag, Chancellor von Bülow, and Colonial Minister

Dernburg to read out the following letter printed in the Koenigsberger

Volkszeitung: ‘Around 2,000 are presently under German imprisonment. Theysurrendered against the guarantee of life, but were nevertheless transferred to

Shark Island in Lüderitz, where, as a doctor assured me, they will all die within

two years due to the climate.’153 Underlining the annihilation policy, in 1907,

acting Governor Oskar Hintrager refused a request to remove 230 women and









children from the island, replying, ‘It will not be possible for them to return to their

homes and to tell others of their treatment there’.154

Shark Island’s lethal policies were communicated to metropolitan Germans

through a variety of channels. Within the government, Ludwig von Estorffreported that between October 1906 and March 1907, a total of 1032 prisoners out

of 1795 died at the camp.155 Among the armed forces, the ‘conditions and conse-

quences’ of Shark Island ‘left an impression on many soldiers . . . and were there-

fore included in many of the Schutztruppe diaries published following the

war,’ according to Erichsen. One contemporary described the camp for German

readers: ‘On the south-western side of the island there was a camp of up to 3000

Hottentot [Nama] prisoners. This part of the camp was separated from the rest by

a barbed wire fence and on top of that was also guarded. . . .The cold nights andprobably also the misery of their fate, as well as outbreak of disease, resulted in the

poor souls dying in large numbers’.156 The Shark Island annihilation project was

also communicated to metropolitan Germans through ongoing Reichstag debates

and subsequent press reports.

In addition to pioneering death camp methods, Shark Island contributed a

genocidal rhetorical mode to German public discourse that the Nazis appear to

have borrowed. During Reichstag debates Colonial Minister Dernburg spoke

euphemistically of how the prisoners ‘died off [eingehen]’ on Shark Island, thussuggesting that a natural selection process – not unlike Hitler’s theory that ‘the

weaker one falls’ – was responsible for the deaths, rather than German policies.157

In a similar attempt to downplay the moral ramifications of murder, Reichstag

Vice President and National Liberal deputy Hermann Paasche publicly dehu-

manized the victims as ‘laboring animals’ in a Reichstag speech. Even those

pleading for humane treatment, like colonial bureaucrat Friedrich von Lindquist,

publicly dehumanized Africans as ‘human material’.158

The German jargon of genocide, deployed in connection with colonial

Namibia, left a legacy adopted and expanded upon by the Nazis. Some Nazi

terms, like Rassenschande, Transport, Konzentrationslager and Endlösung, had

already been deployed in German South West Africa and thus imbued with

malevolent meaning. New Nazi terms, like lebensunwerte Leben (‘lives unworthy

of life’), Sonderbehandlung (‘special handling’) for executions, and Spezialein-

richtungen (‘special installations’) for gas chambers simultaneously sought to

justify and camouflage genocide in much the same way that mass-murdereuphemisms had served the same purpose in connection with German South West

Africa.

The colony’s labor camp system, with major installations in Lüderitz (across

the water from Shark Island), Okahandja, Swakopmund, and Windhoek, as well









as minor installations scattered about the colony, suggests itself as the inspiration

for another Nazi institution: the vast work camp system. Indeed, Zimmerer has

suggested that ‘forced-labor’ was a ‘central aspect’ of the connection between

‘German colonial rule in South West Africa’ and ‘National Socialism’.159

Like the Nazis, administrators in German South West Africa resolved the

tension between deriving economic value from prisoners and quickly murdering

them by working detainees to death. Planning for mass death at the Swakopmund

work camp, authorities kept a Totenregister, or death register, and death certifi-

cates pre-printed with ‘death by exhaustion followed by privation’.160 The

Swakopmund missionary chronicles vividly describe the camp in 1905:

When missionary Vedder arrived in Swakopmund in 1905 there were very

few Herero present. Shortly thereafter vast transports of prisoners of war

arrived. They were placed behind double rows of barbed wire fencing . . .

and housed in pathetic [ jammerlichen] structures constructed out of

simple sacking and planks, in such a manner that in one structure 30–50

people were forced to stay. . . . From early morning until late at night, on

weekdays as well as on Sundays and holidays, they had to work under the

clubs of raw overseers [Knutteln roher Aufseher], until they broke down

[zusammenbrachen]. Added to this the food was extremely scarce. Ricewithout any necessary additions was not enough to support their bodies,

already weakened by life in the field [as refugees] and used to the hot sun

of the interior, from the cold and restless exertion of all their powers in the

prison conditions of Swakopmund. Like cattle hundreds were driven to

death and like cattle they were buried. This opinion may appear hard or

exaggerated, lots changed and became milder during the course of the

imprisonment . . . but the chronicles are not permitted to suppress that

such a remorseless rawness [rucksichtslose Roheit], lusty sensuality [ geileSinnlichkeit], brutish overlordship [brutales Herrentum] was to be found

amongst the troops and civilians here that a full description is hardly

possible.161

Vedder, later a prominent Nazi, wrote in his memoir that at the camp:

During the worst period an average of thirty died daily . . . it was the way

that the system worked. General von Trotha publicly gave expression to

this system of murder through work in an article he published in theSwakopmunder Zeitung: ‘the destruction of all rebellious tribes is the aim

of our efforts’.162

Mobile German South West African forced-labor camps may also have









inspired similar Nazi institutions. The reality of these camps was communicated

to Germany through a variety of channels. Rust’s memoir included a full-page

photo depicting seven Herero prisoners working along a railroad line, under the

supervision of a white overseer. Some wear only loincloths or blankets; others aredressed in rags. All are barefoot and emaciated, in contrast to the well-dressed,

pot-bellied overseer.163 Images like this conveyed a powerful message to German

readers, breaking down barriers to the development and acceptance of the Third

Reich slave labor system. The mobile work camps were catastrophic. Herero

Traugott Tjienda testified that of the 528 Hereros in his work party, 148 perished

while working on a railroad line.164 According to Erichsen, 67 per cent, or 1359 out

of 2014 forced laborers, died while building the Swakopmund railroad line

between January 1906 and June 1907.165

The first German concentration camp system took a terrible toll on its victims.

According to official German figures, of 15,000 Hereros and 2200 Namas incar-

cerated in camps, some 7700, or 45 per cent, perished.166 Given the camps’ role as

a focal point of domestic political debate, they likely exerted significant influence

on later Nazi leaders’ development of similar institutions. Linguistic parallels

strongly suggest that Nazi officials borrowed heavily from colonial Namibia in

creating their own death and work camp system. The Third Reich developed a

vastly larger, more efficient system, but ‘concentration camps’ were introducedinto German history and language through colonial Namibia.

Direct Personal Connections

Probably fewer than 40,000 Germans visited or lived in German South West

Africa prior to the rise of the Third Reich. It is therefore remarkable that out of a

country of 80 million, so many prominent Nazis had direct personal connections

to Wilhelmine Namibia. Zimmerer has suggested that ‘personal experiences are

one of the most obvious reception channels’ for the communication of colonial

ideas to Nazi Germany, but that ‘it is also one of the hardest ideas to grab hold

of’.167 Examining the lives of three Nazi leaders – Hermann Göring, Franz Ritter

von Epp, and Eugen Fischer – suggests that individuals served as conduits

through which colonial and genocidal ideas and methods were transferred from

German South West Africa to the leadership of the Third Reich.

As Hitler’s lieutenant, Hermann Göring helped plan Nazi Germany’s wars, ledthe Luftwaffe, established Nazi Germany’s first concentration camps, and played

a major role in the colonial policies imposed on the occupied East. Göring grew up

surrounded by people intimately connected to German South West Africa. His

mother lived there from 1885 to 1891.168 His older brother was born there and









delivered by Doctor Hermann von Epenstein, who later became Hermann

Göring’s godfather and a pivotal figure in his life.169 Yet, it was Göring’s father’s

experience in the colony that most likely predisposed Hermann Göring toward

colonialism and empire building.As a warrior and colonial administrator, Heinrich Göring left a potent legacy

upon which his son Hermann would build. In 1884, Otto von Bismarck pro-

claimed German possession of an enormous section of Africa stretching from the

Orange River, in the south, to the Kunene River in the north. To facilitate German

domination of the territory, Bismarck selected Doctor Heinrich Göring. Thus,

from 1885 to 1891, Hermann Göring’s father served as the first Reichskommissar

for German South West Africa, befriending Cecil Rhodes, suppressing African

revolts, deploying German troops, signing treaties, working to occupy hundredsof thousands of square miles, and frequently flogging Africans.170 Although not

entirely successful in subduing Namibia’s African peoples, Doctor Göring estab-

lished a new colony that profoundly changed the region; until 26 January 1994, a

major boulevard in Namibia’s capital bore his name: Heinrich Göring Straße.171

Back in Germany, when Hermann Göring was three years old his father retired

and, with time on his hands, the father doted on his son. He allowed the boy to play

with the swords and caps of visiting military officers, regularly took Hermann to

Sunday military parades in Potsdam, and presented him with a Hussar’s uniformat the age of five.172 Returning this paternal affection, the 20-year-old Hermann

wept openly at his father’s 1913 funeral.173

Göring’s authorized, official 1939 Nazi biography presented a son transfixed

by his father’s colonial exploits: ‘The inquisitive and imaginative lad was very

keenly interested in his father’s campaigning as a Reserve officer in the Wars of

1866 and 1870, but he was even more thrilled by his accounts of his pioneer work

as Reichs Commissar for South-West Africa . . . and his fights with Maherero, the

black King of Okahandja’.174 The biography went on to celebrate Doctor Göring’s

‘establish[ment] of the colony on a firm basis [as] a glorious chapter in German

colonial history’.175 Seven years after the publication of this biography, at his

Nuremberg trial, Göring listed ‘the position of my father as first Governor of

Southwest Africa’ as one of the four most important ‘points which are significant

with relation to my later development’.176 As he prepared to make this statement,

Göring had on his prison desk an old photo of his father in the uniform of the

German South West African Reichskommissar.177

From his father’s example, Hermann Göring learned that the conquest and

subjugation of non-Germans was a patriotic path to glory. In his own career, he

brought to the task an enthusiasm, scope, and brutality that dwarfed his father’s

mission. As early as 1933, Hermann Göring declared, ‘I do not have to exercise









justice. I have only to annihilate and destroy [zu vernichten und auszurotten]’.178

His ferocious colonialist notions allowed him to predict that in 1941, ‘this

year between 20 and 30 million persons will die in Russia of hunger’ and then

to conclude, ‘perhaps it is as well that it should be so, for certain nations should bedecimated’.179 As head of the Four-Year Plan he emphasized wholesale theft;

speaking of his Eastern policy in 1942, Göring said, ‘I intend to plunder and do it

thoroughly’.180

Like Hermann Göring, German army officer Franz Ritter von Epp played a

major role in developing and promoting Nazi colonial ideas. However, while

Göring’s connection to German South West Africa was second-hand, von Epp

spent two years there, participating in the Herero genocide. He acted as a direct

human conduit through which German South West African ideas and methodsflowed into the highest echelons of the Third Reich. Von Epp employed and influ-

enced future Nazi leaders, played a crucial role in developing the Nazi Party, and

was a Third Reich leader until his 1945 capture by the US Army.

Arriving in German South West Africa on 1 March 1904, von Epp was in one of

the first waves of volunteer soldiers sent to suppress the Herero Uprising.181

Serving as a Company Commander, under von Trotha, von Epp led soldiers in a

number of operations against the Herero, including the decisive Battle of the

Waterberg and its genocidal aftermath.182 Von Epp was also in the colony duringthe establishment of the concentration camps and did not leave until 1906.

Following military service in World War I, von Epp employed, influenced, and

nurtured numerous future Nazi leaders from successive positions of authority. In

February 1919, he formed the right-wing Freikorps Epp and led the unit in crush-

ing the revolutionary, socialist Bavarian Räterepublik before briefly installing

himself as dictator of Bavaria. Then, from late 1919 to 1928, he commanded the

Reichswehr’s new Battalion Epp, based in Munich.183

The list of men employed by von Epp following the First World War reads like

a who’s who of early Nazi leadership. Both Rudolf Hess, who later became Nazi

Party deputy leader, and Gregor Strasser, who later led the Nazi Party’s left wing,

served under von Epp. So did Walther Schultze, who as Nazi National Leader of

the Association of University Lecturers removed Jews from German university

posts and participated in the Nazi euthanasia program.184 Ernst Röhm, who

founded the SA, or Storm Troopers, served as the general’s aide-de-camp for nine

years.185

Von Epp’s influence on the early Nazi party may even explain howRöhm’s SA became the ‘brown shirts’. In 1924, Hitler, Göring, Röhm and other

Nazi leaders chose to dress the party’s brown-shirted Storm Troopers in the same

colonial Schutztruppe uniform that von Epp had worn in German South West

Africa.186









Most importantly, von Epp influenced and nurtured Röhm’s then close friend,

Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler. Von Epp employed Hitler first as a paid informer

who, immediately following von Epp’s seizure of power in 1919, fingered com-

munist soldiers under von Epp’s command. Later, von Epp employed Hitler as an‘educator’ charged with instilling nationalist and anti-Bolshevist sentiments in

the soldiers of the new Battalion Epp.187 It was while serving von Epp in this

capacity that, according to Ian Kershaw, Hitler ‘stumbled across his greatest

talent. As Hitler himself put it, he could “speak’’’.188 Von Epp thus helped launch

Hitler’s political career and likely steered the future dictator toward right-wing

politics; during this period both men joined the forerunner to the Nazi Party, the

tiny Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei, or German Workers’ Party.

Von Epp was a committed Nazi during the movement’s uncertain, early years.In May 1928, he was elected to the Reichstag on the Nazi ticket along with

Gottfried Feder, Wilhelm Frick, Joseph Goebbels, and Gregor Strasser. He

entered the Reichstag as one of only a dozen Nazi delegates among 500 Reichstag

members.

As a Nazi leader, von Epp was deeply influenced by his military service in

German South West Africa and he, in turn, profoundly influenced Hitler’s colonial

policies. According to von Epp’s 1940 biography:

The experiences forged at this time [during the Namibian war and geno-

cide] live on. The result of the perhaps small, but in its execution delicate

and in its aftermath often bloody [episode], was the formation of a set of

projected colonial goals that have not been lost. The employment of these

goals in German colonial politics, and in the empire of Adolf Hitler, has

been made certain through Reichsleiter Ritter von Epp.189

Once in power, Hitler rewarded von Epp for his loyal work. On 10 April 1933,

Hitler appointed von Epp Governor of Bavaria, a position he held for 12 years.190

In Bavaria, he presided over the construction of Dachau, as well as the murder of

virtually all Bavarian Jews and Gypsies. On 5 May 1934, Hitler appointed him

Leiter, or head, of the Colonial Policy Office of the Nazi Party, a position from

which he helped to plan colonial policies.191 As Klaus Hildebrand has observed, in

1939, Hitler gave von Epp ‘responsibility for preparing and developing future

colonial plans and concerns’.192 Von Epp continued to serve the Third Reich

loyally until the very end, dying in US custody on 31 January 1947.193

Like von Epp, anthropologist Eugen Fischer played an important role in

developing and realizing Nazi colonial and genocidal ideas. Moreover, Fischer’s

personal experiences in German South West Africa shaped how he thought about

these issues. However, Fischer’s ideas focused less on colonialism than on racism,









and whereas von Epp was indirectly involved in Nazi mass murder, Fischer was

intimately involved.

In 1908, while Herero and Nama were dying in concentration camps, Fischer

arrived in German South West Africa and began a pseudo-scientific study of 310children. He aimed to gather two kinds of data from each child: physical charac-

teristics, like eye and hair color, and measurements of intelligence. Fischer then

compared these two data sets and fabricated correlations between physical traits

and intellectual acumen. The children Fischer studied were Basters, members of

an Afrikaans-speaking Namibian minority descended from intermarriage among

Boers, Britons, Germans, and Khoikhoin.194 His findings, published as Die

Rehobother Bastards in 1913, had a tremendous impact in Germany.195 According

to Henry Friedlander, ‘This study not only established [Fischer’s reputation] butalso influenced all subsequent German racial legislation, including the Nurem-

berg Laws’.196

Fischer argued that the offspring of interracial unions are of ‘lesser racial

quality’ and that his subjects’ cognitive abilities were inversely proportional to

their African physical characteristics.197 He continued: ‘Without exception, every

European people that has absorbed the blood of the inferior races – and that Negro

Hottentots, and many others are inferior is something that only dreamers can

deny – have paid for this absorption of inferior elements by intellectual and cul-tural decline’.198 Fischer even hinted that genocide might be an appropriate

policy toward the Basters, if they lost their usefulness to the Germans:

One ought to give them the amount of protection that they need, as a race

inferior to us, so that their existence will last. They ought to be given no

more and it should only be for so long as they are useful to us. Otherwise

free competition, which means in my opinion, their extinction! This point

of view sounds almost brutally egotistical – but whosoever thinks all theway through the previously described ‘psychological points’ [described in

the monograph] cannot be of any other opinion.199

That Fischer formulated such conclusions as a result of time spent in colonial

Namibia is hardly surprising. While Fischer played at science, the German Army

concluded the killing of some 40–70,000 Hereros and some 6–7000 Namas.200 In

the concentration camps, hundreds of post-mortems were conducted for the

purported study of the causes of death while the bodies of executed prisoners werepreserved, packed, and shipped to Germany for dissection.201

Drenched in racism, the colonial German community’s belief-system and its

involvement in racist pseudo-science probably influenced Fischer. Or, perhaps

Fischer simply borrowed from Germans in the colony. Colonial laws forbade









interracial unions and in 1905, a civil servant named Tecklenburg reported that,

‘Relationships between whites and natives will not strengthen the race, but only

weaken it. The offspring of such relationships are, as a rule, mentally and physi-

cally weak’.202

Settlers might also have given Fischer his idea that the Basters’right to exist hinged upon their utility to Germans; a missionary named Elger

observed that, ‘The settler holds that the native has a right to exist only in so far as

he is useful to the white man.’203 Unfortunately, the concepts Fischer developed or

collected in German South West Africa helped shape one nation’s destiny and the

destruction of many others.

Fischer and the ideas in Die Rehobother Bastards directly influenced Hitler’s

own thinking on race and interracial mixing. As Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang

Wipperman argue, ‘it is certain that Hitler knew the most important racialtheories [including] the work of . . . Fischer.’204 Indeed, while writing Mein Kampf

in prison, Hitler was given a book co-authored by Fischer and two of his

employees.205 Hitler echoed Fischer’s ideas: ‘The result of all racial crossing is

therefore in brief always the following: (a) Lowering of the level of the higher race;

(b) Physical and intellectual regression and hence the beginning of a slowly but

surely progressing sickness.’206

In 1927, Fischer became director of the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for

Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics in Berlin. There he directed aca-demics working in three fields of Rassenkunde, or racial studies: Racial Anthro-

pology, which he supervised, Human Heredity, which Othmar von Verschuer

directed, and Eugenics, supervised by Hermann Muckermann.207 Under the

Hitler regime, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute began producing scholarship intended

to support Nazi racial beliefs and goals. Fischer was particularly interested in

developing a biological justification for anti-Semitism. To this end, he fabricated a

substantial body of racist literature. For example, in collaborative work seeking

to prove the timeless origins of an imagined Jewish threat to civilization, co-

authored with theologian Gerhard Kittel, the two men argued that ‘always the

[Jewish] aim is: world domination . . . always and at all times, in the first century

as in the twentieth, world Jewry dreams of exclusive world domination on earth

and in the hereafter.’208 Fischer and his employees also helped build racist legisla-

tion and served on committees that developed laws excluding Jews, Gypsies, and

other ‘non-Aryans’ from German citizenship.209

Fischer used his position and authority to disseminate the ideas he had devel-oped in colonial Namibia. He frequently lectured to large audiences, for example

delivering a speech to over 1000 people at the University of Cologne on 22 October

1936.210 Also, by training SS doctors and German medical students in eugenics

and ‘racial hygiene’, Fischer indoctrinated many of those responsible for promot-









ing and perpetrating genocide. He also supported physicians directly involved in

mass murder and associated crimes against humanity. 211

Anthropologist Eva Justin, for example, was one of Fischer’s academic

protégés. Although Justin purported to study Gypsies, her work frequently led tothe sterilization and murder of her subjects. As Isabel Fonseca notes, ‘In her

influential reports, she recommended that full and part-Gypsies, including the

educated and assimilated, be sterilized; education of Gypsies was fruitless and

should be stopped. Often after one of her visits the interviewee and sometimes the

entire family would be removed to a camp.’212 The Gypsy children she studied for

her doctoral dissertation, for example, were all murdered at Auschwitz.213

SS Doctor Josef Mengele received training from Fischer’s Kaiser Wilhelm

Institute, became a member of the institute, and maintained a close relationshipwith the organization while conducting his Auschwitz pseudo-research.214 While

at Auschwitz, the institute helped secure Mengele the grants that funded his

projects on eye-color, twins, and disease.215 Mengele then ‘sent the eyes of

murdered Gypsies, the internal organs of murdered children, and the sera of

others he had deliberately infected with typhoid back to the Kaiser Wilhelm

Institute for analysis’, much as skull-filled chests had been sent to the Berlin

Pathological Institute from German South West African camps.216 He also regu-

larly communicated his findings to the institute and to his old graduate schooladvisor, Othmar von Verschuer, who worked under Fischer from 1927 to 1935,

and in 1942, succeeded Fischer as head of the institute.217 Fischer and Mengele

were connected through von Verschuer, who maintained an active correspond-

ence with Fischer relating to the institute at least into November 1944, through the

period Mengele spent torturing and killing at Auschwitz.218 Realizing its incrimi-

nating nature, von Verschuer destroyed all correspondence between himself and

Mengele along with two truckloads of Kaiser Wilhelm Institute documents in

1945.219

Fischer himself acted on the conclusions he had reached in German South West

Africa to play two direct roles in programmatic Nazi racial violence. First, he

served as one of three scientists on the Gestapo’s ‘Special Commission Number

Three’ that planned and implemented ‘the discrete sterilization of Rheinland

bastards[Afro-Germans]’.220 Second, Fischer provided ‘scientific’ testimony on

the racial heritage of German citizens under investigation by the Nazi regime.

Some of those he deemed insufficiently ‘Aryan’ were later murdered as part of theNazi racial purification program.

Göring, von Epp, and Fischer were not the only Third Reich Germans con-

nected to German South West Africa. Indeed, the colonial Namibian experience

affected large swaths of Wilhelmine, Weimar and Nazi society, glorifying con-









quest and colonization while breaking down moral and political barriers to geno-

cide. Personal connections, literature, and public debates also communicated

colonialist and genocidal ideas and methods from the colony to Germany.

Hundreds of thousands of Germans knew or were related to the nearly 20,000soldiers sent to the colony between 1904 and 1908. Literature also communicated

colonial ideas to hundreds of thousands of other Germans. The Herero and Nama

Uprisings and subsequent genocide also produced numerous Reichstag debates

and newspaper editorials that reached millions more. Indeed German South West

African colonialism, genocide and associated ideas were part of German domestic

discourse from 1904 until the rise of the Nazis. The Third Reich then cele-

brated the former colony with books, an enormous 16,600-ton ship christened

Windhuk,221 and even collectible cigarette packet cards romantically depictingGerman rule in Namibia.222

The Third Reich love affair with the African Kaiserreich demonstrates that

the Hitler regime saw the former colonies as a model for their Eastern European

ambitions. In controlling and producing media, Nazis created a narrative in which

these former colonies supported Eastern European colonialism as a nostalgic

return, albeit geographically refocused, to a pre-Versailles normalcy in which

Germans ruled over vast areas populated by sub-humans. Literature celebrating

the African Kaiserreich flourished under the Nazis. Popular titles included HugoBlumhagen’s South West Africa Then and Now (1934), Rohrbach’s German

Africa, End or Beginning? (1935), The Book of German Colonies (1936), and Fritz

Spiesser’s Homecoming: a Novel of South African Germans (1943), which

was awarded several prizes by von Epp’s Reichskolonialbund.223 Cinema also

celebrated Germans in Africa. Some films, like the 1938 German Land in Africa,

and German Planters on Kilimanjaro, cultivated nostalgia for rule over docile

natives in a vast Lebensraum. Others, like Carl Peters (1941) and Germanin

(1943), attempted to justify anti-Semitism, colonialism, and German racial

superiority by using Germans in Africa as a screen on which to project propa-

ganda relevant to these themes.224 Nazis chose to celebrate the African Kaiserreich

because it so closely prefigured their own ideas and policies. Pro-Nazi audiences

accepted this propaganda because they thought of the African colonial project,

and its bloodiest, most populous settler colony – German South West Africa – in

admiring, nostalgic terms.

Nazi colonialism in Eastern Europe broadly followed patterns set in GermanSouth West Africa not by chance, but because Germans in Wilhelmine Namibia

had pioneered the implementation of Lebensraum theory, the brutal treatment of

colonized people as sub-humans, and the use of legally institutionalized racism,

all of which were central to later Nazi rule in the East. Likewise, Third Reich









leaders borrowed ideas and methods from the German South West African

genocide that they then employed and expanded upon. Genocidal rhetoric, a new

definition of Vernichtungskrieg, executing POWs, murdering civilians en masse,

and deporting POWs and noncombatants to work and death camps were all intro-duced to modern German history through the Namibian colonial experience.

German South West Africa also set precedents that helped erode barriers to

brutal colonialism and genocide in Europe. As Zimmerer has suggested, ‘the

parallels’ between ‘the crimes of National Socialism’ and ‘colonialism . . . help

explain why the expulsion and resettlement of the Jews and Slavs, and ultimately

their murder, were not perceived as breaking a taboo’.225 Obstacles to these

policies still existed when Hitler came to power, but Nazis dismantled them.

Lothar von Trotha’s Schutztruppen were not the only antecedent to ReinhardHeydrich’s Einsatzgruppen. Nor was Shark Island the only precursor to

Auschwitz. The roots of Nazi ideas and policies range well beyond the German

South West African experience. However, connections can be drawn from the

colony to the Third Reich as one way of understanding the origins of Nazi imperi-

alism and mass murder in Eastern Europe. German South West Africa should

no longer be overlooked as an important antecedent to Nazi colonialism and

genocide.

Acknowledgement

The author is grateful to Rebecca Emerson, Casper Erichsen, Ute Frevert, Jan-Bart Gewald, Paul

Kennedy, Ben Kiernan, Wendy Lower, Dirk Moses, Browny Mutarifa, Sarah Philips, Hans-

Dietrich Schultz, Jan Simpson, Jörg Wassink, and Jürgen Zimmerer for encouragement,

references, and criticism of earlier drafts. They are responsible for neither his views nor his errors.

Notes

1. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York 1951).

2. Sven Lindquist, Joan Tate, trans. Exterminate All the Brutes (New York 1996); Enzo Traverso,

Janet Lloyd, trans. Origins of Nazi Violence (New York 2003); A. Dirk Moses, ‘Conceptual

Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the ‘Racial Century’, Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 36,

No. 4 (2002), 31.

3. Zimmerer has argued that, ‘the murder of the Jews . . . would probably not have been

thinkable and possible if the idea that ethnicities can simply be wiped out had not already

existed and had not already been put into action.’ Jürgen Zimmerer, Andrew H. Beattie, trans.

‘Colonialism and the Holocaust’, in A. Dirk Moses, ed., Genocide and Settler Society (New

York 2004a), 68.

4. Ibid., 64–5.

5. Isabel V. Hull, ‘Military Culture and the Production of “Final Solutions” in the Colonies’, in

Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan, eds, The Specter of Genocide (Cambridge, MA 2003),

141–62.









6. Alison Palmer, Colonial Genocide (Adelaide 2000), 149.

7. Maximilian Bayer, Mit dem Hauptquartier in Südwestafrika (Berlin 1909), 139.

8. Jon Bridgman, The Revolt of the Hereros (Berkeley, CA 1981), 111–12.

9. Estimates of the Herero population in 1904 vary widely.

10. Horst Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting (London 1980), 151.11. For more information on confiscation of land and cattle see Robert Blake, A History of

Rhodesia (London 1977), 115, and Philip Mason, The Birth of a Dilemma (Oxford 1958), 188.

12. Terence Ranger, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia (Evanston, IL 1967), 131, 3.

13. Blake, op. cit., 136, 106.

14. For more information on land confiscation and alienation, see Shula Marks, Reluctant

Rebellion (Oxford 1970), 121.

15. Edgar Brookes and Colin Webb, History of Natal (Pietermaritzburg 1965), 224.

16. Shula Marks, ‘Class, Ideology, and the Bhambatha Rebellion’, in Donald Crummey, ed.,

Banditry, Rebellion and Social Protest in Africa (London 1986), 352.17. Brookes and Webb, op. cit., 229.

18. Marks (1986), op. cit., 352.

19. Traverso, op. cit., 65; Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (London 1999), 233.

20. Joseph Conrad, Last Essays (London 1955), 17.

21. Traverso, op. cit., 67.

22. Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire (Durham, NC 2001), 94.

23. George Crothers, The German Elections of 1907 (London 1941), 36, 38.

24. Harriet Wanklyn, Friedrich Ratzel (Cambridge 1961), 84.

25. Woodruff Smith, ‘Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum’, German Studies Review,Vol. III, No. 1 (February 1980), 54.

26. Friedrich Ratzel, ‘Der Lebensraum’, in Festgaben für Albert Schäffle (Tübingen 1901),

179–80.

27. Wanklyn, op. cit., 25.

28. ‘Die Aussichten unseres südwestafrikanischen Schutzgebietes,’ in Die Grenzboten, Vol. 51,

No. 4, 171–5.

29. Lindquist, op. cit., 144.

30. Ibid., 144.

31. Friedrich Ratzel, Das Meer als Quelle der Völkergröße (Munich 1900), op. cit.

32. Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Karl Haushofer (Boppard am Rhein 1979), 239; Ian Kershaw, Hitler:

1889–1936 (New York 1999), 249.

33. Helmut Bley, ‘Social Discord in South West Africa’, in Prosser Gifford and William Lewis,

eds, Britain and Germany in Africa (New Haven, CT 1966), 611.

34. Curt von François, Deutsch-Südwest-Afrika (Berlin 1899), 49.

35. Gerhardus Pool, Maharero (Windhoek 1990), 117.

36. Paul Rohrbach, Deutsche Kolonialwirtschaft, I (Berlin 1907), 282.

37. John Wellington, South West Africa (Oxford 1967), 194.

38. Kershaw, op. cit., 249, 288.

39. Josef Krumbach, Franz Ritter von Epp (Munich 1940), 249.

40. Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop, eds, The Imperialist Imagination

(Ann Arbor, MI 1998), 16; Robert Wistrich, Who’s Who in Nazi Germany (New York 1982),

107.

41. Ritter von Epp, ‘Introduction’, in H. Blumhagen, Südwestafrika (Berlin 1934), 5.









42. Quoted in Krumbach, op. cit., 255.

43. Adolf Hitler, Ralf Mannheim, trans., Mein Kampf (Boston, MA 1943),138.

44. Ibid., 643.

45. Ibid., 646.

46. Ibid., 652.47. German Foreign Office, Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–1945, Vol. VI (London

1956), 575.

48. Istvan Deak, The Politics of Retribution in Europe (Princeton, NJ 2000), 25–6.

49. Reinhard Heydrich, ‘The Final Solution’, in Brian Macarthur, ed., The Penguin Book of

Twentieth Century Speeches (New York 2000), 208–9.

50. Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich (New York 2001), 439.

51. Hitler, op. cit., 138; Hitler, quoted in A. Duff Cooper, The Nazi Claims to Colonies (London

1939), 53.

52. Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Geburt des “Ostlandes” aus dem Geiste des Kolonialismus’, SozialGeschichte (February 2004b), 40–1.

53. Theodore Leutwein, Elf Jahre Gouverneur in Deutsch Südwestafrika (Berlin 1907), 415;

Heinrich Vedder, Cyril Hall, trans. and ed., South West Africa (London 1966), 229.

54. Maximilian Bayer, Der Krieg in Südwestafrika (Leipzig 1906), 11.

55. Israel Goldblatt, History of South West Africa (Capetown 1971), 147; Rohrbach (1907), op.

cit., 349.

56. Leutwein, op. cit., 223.

57. H. Hanemann, Wirtschaftliche Verhältnisse in Südwestafrika (Berlin 1905), 46.

58. Bayer, op. cit., 98, 200. 59. Erich von Salzmann, Im Kampfe gegen die Herero (Berlin 1912), 186–7.

60. Conrad Rust, Krieg und Frieden im Hererolande (Berlin 1905), 196.

61. Quoted in Jan-Bart Gewald, Herero Heroes (Athens 1999), 190.

62. Casper W. Erichsen, ‘The Angel of Death Has Descended Violently Among Them’,

unpublished MA thesis (Windhoek 2004), 187.

63. Peter Katjavivi, A History of Resistance in Namibia (Paris 1988), 9.

64. Wendy Lower, ‘German Colonialism and Genocide’, unpublished paper presented at the

Conference of Colonial Genocide, Sydney, Australia, June 2003, 16.

65. Helmut Bley, Hugh Ridley, trans., South West Africa Under German Rule (Evanston, IL

1971), 139–40.

66. Paul Rohrbach, Edmund von Mach, trans., German World Policies (New York 1915), 57, 135.

67. Quoted in John Noyes, ‘National Identity, Nomadism, and Narration’, in Friedrichsmeyer,

Lennox and Zantop, op. cit., 95–6.

68. Bley, op. cit., 165; Jürgen Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft über Afrikaner (Münster 2000), 85.

69. Martyn Housden, Hans Frank, Lebensraum and the Final Solution (New York 2003), 122.

70. Martin Gilbert, The Second World War (New York 1991), 19.

71. Quoted in Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, trans., Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944 (New

York 2000), 33.

72. Alan Bullock, Hitler (New York 1962), 697.

73. Traverso, op. cit., 72, 161.

74. Quoted in Karel Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair (Cambridge 2004), 309.

75. Bley, op. cit., 140.

76. David Soggot, Namibia (London 1986), 7.









77. Drechsler (1980), op. cit., 136.

78. Wildenthal, op. cit., 79.

79. Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge 2003), n.47, 319.

80. Wildenthal, op. cit., 84, 87–8.

81. Helmut W. Smith, ‘Talk of Genocide’, in Friedrichsmeyer, Lennox and Zantop, op. cit.,116–22.

82. Quoted in Sabine Hake, ‘Mapping the Human Body’, in Friedrichsmeyer, Lennox and

Zantop, op. cit., 176.

83. Kershaw, op. cit., 563, 564.

84. Koonz, op. cit., 25, 116, 171, 180.

85. Zimmerer (2004a), op. cit., 57.

86. Kershaw, op. cit., 565, 564.

87. Pool, op. cit., 1.

88. Leutwein, op. cit., 466.89. Ibid., 467; Bridgman, op. cit., 69.

90. Horst Drechsler, Südwestafrika unter Deutscher Kolonialherrschaft (Berlin 1966), 169.

91. Ibid., 168.

92. Drechsler (1980), op. cit., 141–2.

93. Smith, op. cit., 107–8.

94. Crothers, op. cit., 110.

95. Doktor Hartmann, Die Zunkunft Deutsch-Suedwestafrikas (Berlin 1904), 21.

96. Kurt Schwabe, Der Krieg in Deutsch-Südwestafrika (Berlin 1907), 300.

97. Rohrbach (1907), op. cit., 350.98. Rohrbach (1915), op. cit., 141, 135.

99. According to Michael Burleigh, in the East ‘the Nazis imagined they had a tabula rasa’.

Burleigh, op. cit., 427–8.

100. Claudia Koonz has traced the Nazi use of this phrase. Koonz, op. cit., n2, 277.

101. Ibid., 254, 252.

102. Zimmerer has noted parallels between the killing of POWs and civilians in German South

West Africa and in occupied Eastern Europe. Zimmerer (2000b), op. cit., 27.

103. Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Krieg, KZ und Völkermord in Südwestafrika,’ in Jürgen Zimmerer and

Joachim Zeller, eds. Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika (Berlin 2003), 58.

104. Tilman Dedering, ‘A Certain Rigorous Treatment’, in Mark Levene and Penny Roberts, eds,

The Massacre in History (New York 1999), 208.

105. Hull, op. cit., 154.

106. Drechsler (1980), op. cit. 163, 165; John Bridgman and Leslie J. Worley, ‘Genocide of the

Hereros’, in Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons, and Israel W. Charney, eds, Century of

Genocide (New York 1995), 18–19; Gesine Krüger, Kriegsbewältigung und

Geschichtebewusstein (Göttingen 1999) 65–6.

107. Pool, op. cit., 251.

108. Generalstab, ed., Die Kämpfe der deutschen Truppen in Südwestafrika, I (Berlin 1906),

132.

109. Reprinted in Rust, op. cit., 385.

110. Generalstab, op. cit., 211.

111. Ibid., 214.

112. Rust, op. cit., 385.









113. Hamburg Institute for Social Research, ed., Paula Bredish, trans., The German Army and

Genocide (New York 1999), 23.

114. Norman Rich, Hitler’s War Aims, II (London 1974), 74.

115. Anthony Beevor, Stalingrad (New York 1999), 15.

116. Richard Overy, Russia’s War (New York 1997), 84.117. Quoted in Drechsler (1980), op. cit., 152.

118. Administrator’s Office, Windhuk, ed., Report on the Natives of South-West Africa and their

Treatment by Germany (London 1918), 64. Jan-Bart Gewald and Jeremy Silvester argue

persuasively for the authenticity of the Report’s testimony. Jan-Bart Gewald and Jeremy

Silvester, Words Cannot Be Found (Boston, MA 2003), Introduction.

119. Administrator’s Office, Report, 65.

120. Von Salzmann, op. cit., 94; Generalstab, op. cit., 186.

121. Gewald, op.cit., 197.

122. Quoted in Pool, op. cit., 293.123. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent (New York 1998), 168.

124. Christian Streit, ‘The Fate of Soviet Prisoners of War’, in Michael Berenbaum, A Mosaic of

Victims (New York 1990), 142.

125. Generalstab, op. cit., 186.

126. Bridgman, op. cit., 126, For post-battle massacres, see Drechsler (1980), op. cit., 157.


128. Richard Lukas, ‘The Polish Experience during the Holocaust’, in Berenbaum, op. cit., 95.

129. Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Occupied Russia (New York 1957), 278.

130. US Office of Chief of Counsel, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, IV (Washington, DC1946), 427.

131. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men (New York 1998), 11.

132. Ibid., 10.

133. Pool, op. cit., 270.

134. Hull, op. cit., 156.


136. US Office of Chief of Counsel, op. cit., 572–8.

137. Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors (New York 1986), 148.

138. Ibid., 477.

139. Smith, op. cit., 111, 113.

140. Ibid., 112, 118.

141. Drechsler (1980), op. cit., 214–16; Bley, op. cit., 170–3, 226–48.

142. Schwabe, op. cit., 306.

143. Walter Nuhn, Sturm über Südwest (Bonn 1997), 351.

144. For a history of the concentration camp see Andrzej J. Kaminski, Konzentrationslager 1896

bis heute: eine Analyse (Stuttgart 1982).

145. Smith, op. cit., 111.

146. Casper W. Erichsen, ‘Namibia’s Island of Death’, New African, No. 421

(August/September, 2003), 49.

147. Zimmerer has suggested that German South West African camps ‘show the beginnings of a

bureaucratic form of annihilation in camps, along with growing degrees of organization, even

though such active, industrial killing as we saw after 1941 in the Nazi annihilation camps

was not yet in existence.’ Zimmerer (2004b), op. cit., 32.









148. Quoted in Erichsen (2004), op. cit., 147.

149. Quoted in Zimmerer (2000), op. cit., 46–7.

150. Erichsen (2003), op. cit., 49.

151. Erichsen (2004), op. cit., 198.

152. Administrator’s Office, op. cit., 99.153. Erichsen (2003), op. cit., 314–15.

154. Ibid.,312.

155. Drechsler (1980), op. cit., 212.

156. Erichsen (2004), op. cit., 169.

157. Smith, op. cit., 113. Kershaw, op. cit., 289.

158. Smith, op. cit., 113.

159. Zimmerer (2004b), op. cit., 25.

160. Gewald (1999), op. cit., 189.

161. Ibid., 188.162. Heinrich Vedder, Kurze Geschichten (Wuppertal-Barmen 1953), 139.

163. Rust, op. cit., 443.

164. Administrator’s Office, op. cit., 101–2.

165. Erichsen (2003), op. cit., 48.

166. Bley, op. cit., 151.

167. Zimmerer (2004b), op. cit., 33.

168. Asher Lee, Goering (New York 1972), 12, 14.

169. Charles Bewley, Hermann Göring (New York 1962), 12; Mosley, The Reich Marshal (New

York 1974), 17.170. Kurt Singer, Göring (London 1940), 18.

171. Browny Mutarifa, of the Windhoek City Council, generously provided this information.

172. Lee, op. cit., 12.

173. Ibid., 14.

174. Erich Gritzbach, Gerald Griffin, trans., Hermann Goering (London 1939), 222.

175. Ibid., 223, 224.

176. http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/proc/03–13–46.htm#Goering1

177. Bewley, op. cit., 241.

178. Koonz, op. cit., 35.

179. Galeazzo Ciano, Malcolm Muggeridge, ed., Stuart Hood, trans., Ciano’s Diplomatic Papers

(London 1948), 465.

180. Trial of the Major War Criminals, IX (Buffalo 1995), 633.

181. Krumbach, op. cit., 186.

182. Wolfgang Benz, Hermann Graml and Hermann Weiß, Enzyklopädie des

Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart 1997), 833; Krumbach, op. cit., 206–7.

183. Wistrich, op. cit., 67.

184. Ibid., 130, 302, 280.

185. Gerald Reitlinger, The SS (New York 1957), 475.

186. Martin Baer and Olaf Schröter, Eine Kopfjagd (Berlin 2001), 156–7.

187. Wistrich, op. cit., 67, 146; Kershaw, op. cit., 120, 174.

188. Kershaw, op. cit., 124.

189. Krumbach, op. cit., 241–2.

190. Kershaw, op. cit., 469.









191. Benz, Graml and Weiß, op. cit., 547, 833.

192. Quoted in Baer and Schröter, op. cit., 164.

193. Wistrich, op. cit., 68.

194. Peter Carstens, Introduction, in Maximilian Bayer, Peter Carstens, trans. and ed., The

Rehoboth Baster Nation (Basel 1984), 4.195. Eugen Fischer, Die Rehobother Bastards (Jena 1913).

196. Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide (Chapel Hill, NC 1995), 11.

197. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State (Cambridge 1991), 38.

198. Fischer, op. cit., 302.

199. Ibid., 302.

200. Drechsler (1980), op. cit., 151.

201. Gewald (1999), op. cit., 189–90, n.256.

202. Zimmerer (2000), op. cit., 99–100.

203. Drechsler (1966), op. cit., 349.204. Burleigh and Wippermann, op. cit., 37–8.

205. Friedlander, op. cit., 13.

206. Hitler, op. cit., 286.

207. Friedlander, op. cit., 12–13.

208. Koonz, op. cit., 200; Max Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors (New Haven, CT 1999), 216–17.

209. Friedlander, op. cit., 25.

210. Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between Unification and Nazism

(Cambridge 1989), 502.

211. Burleigh and Wippermann, op. cit., 53; Koonz, op. cit., 107; Weindling, op. cit., 553.212. Isabel Fonseca, Bury Me Standing (London 1995), 258.

213. Friedlander, op. cit. 251.

214. Gerald L. Posner and John Ware, Mengele (New York 2000), 14.

215. Ibid., 12.

216. Burleigh and Wippermann, op. cit., 54; Lifton, op. cit., 361.

217. Lifton, op. cit., 357.

218. Weindling, op. cit., 564.

219. Posner and Ware, op. cit., 41, 59.

220. Clarence Lusane, Hitler’s Black Victims (New York 2002), 139.

221. Das Buch der deutschen Kolonien (Leipzig 1937), 18; S.D. Waters, The Royal New Zealand

Navy (Wellington 1956), 36.

222. Cigaretten-Bilderdienst Dresden, Deutsche Kolonien (Dresden 1936).

223. Hugo Blumhagen, Südwestafrika (Berlin 1934) ; Paul Rohrbach, Deutsch-Afrika (Potsdam

1935); Buch der deutschen Kolonien; Fritz Spiesser, Heimkehr (Munich 1943); Hake, op. cit.,

n.5, 170.

224. This interpretation of Nazi cinema is borrowed from the work of Sabine Hake. See Hake,

op. cit., 163–87.

225. Zimmerer (2004a), op. cit., 68.

benjamin madley is currently completing a PhD in History at Yale University.
