In 1884, German chancellor Otto von Bismarck convened a
meeting of European powers known as the Berlin Conference. Though the
conference determined the future of an entire continent, not a single black
African was invited to participate. Bismarck declared South-West Africa a
German colony suitable not only for trade but for European settlement.
Belgium's King Leopold, meanwhile seized the Congo, and France claimed control
of West Africa.
The German flag soon became a symbol of fear for local
tribes, who had lived there for millennia. Missionaries were followed by
merchants, who were followed by soldiers. The settlers asserted their control
by seizing watering holes, which were crucial in the parched desert. Like
Belgians in the Congo and the British in Australia, the official German policy
was to seize territory that Europeans considered empty, when it most definitely
was not. There were 13 tribes living in Namibia, of which two of the most
powerful were the Nama and the Herero.
Germany's behavior in South-West Africa was a precursor of
German actions in the Holocaust. The boldest among them argued that South-West
Africa was the site of the first genocide of the 20th century. “Our
understanding of what Nazism was and where its underlying ideas and
philosophies came from,” write David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen in their
book The Kaiser's Holocaust, “is perhaps incomplete unless we explore what
happened in Africa under Kaiser Wilhelm II.”
German researchers treated Africans as mere test subjects.
Papers published in German medical journals used skull measurements to justify
calling Africans Untermenschen — subhumans. If these tactics sound chillingly familiar,
that's because they were also used in Nazi Germany. The connections don't end
there. One scientist who studied race in Namibia was a professor of Josef
Mengele—the infamous “Angel of Death” who conducted experiments on Jews in
Auschwitz. Heinrich Goering, the father of Hitler's right-hand man, was
colonial governor of German South-West Africa. What they did in Namibia, they
did with Jews.
Many German farmers felt that South-West Africa was theirs
for the taking. Disputes with local tribes escalated into violence. In early
1904, the Germans opened aggressive negotiations that aimed to drastically
shrink Herero territory, but the chiefs wouldn't sign. They refused to be
herded into a small patch of unfamiliar territory that was badly suited for
grazing. Colonial leaders sent a telegram to Berlin announcing an uprising,
though no fighting had broken out.
Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha took over as colonial
governor, and with his arrival, the rhetoric of forceful negotiations gave way
to the rhetoric of racial extermination. Von Trotha issued an infamous order
called the Vernichtungsbefehl—an extermination order.
“The Herero are no
longer German subjects,” read von Trotha's order. “The Herero people will have
to leave the country. If the people refuse I will force them with cannons to do
so. Within the German boundaries, every Herero, with or without firearms, with
or without cattle, will be shot. I won’t accommodate women and children
anymore. I shall drive them back to their people or I shall give the order to
shoot at them.”
German soldiers surrounded Herero villages. Thousands of men
and women were taken from their homes and shot. Those who escaped fled into the
desert—and German forces guarded its borders, trapping survivors in a wasteland
without food or water. They poisoned wells to make the inhuman conditions even
worse—tactics that were already considered war crimes under the Hague
Convention, which were first agreed to in 1899.
80 percent of the Herero tribe died, and many survivors were
imprisoned in forced labor camps. After a rebellion of Nama fighters, these
same tactics were used against Nama men, women, and children. About 65,000
Herero and 10,000 Nama were murdered.
Only after Namibia gained independence from South Africa in
1990 did the German government really begin to acknowledge the systematic
atrocity that had happened there. Although historians used the word genocide
starting in the 1970s, Germany officially refused to use the term. The German government
used a technicality to avoid formally apologizing for genocide in South-West
Africa saying that the Genocide Convention was put in place in 1948, and cannot
be applied retroactively. Nevertheless, more and more German politicians have
begun talking openly about genocide. In July, the president of the German
parliament, Norbert Lammert, in an article for the newspaper Die Zeit,
described the killing of Herero and Nama as Voelkermord. Literally, this
translates to “the murder of a people”—genocide.
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