Kaiser's Holocaust (2 page)

What inspired the elder Göring to volunteer for service in Africa was that, like many Germans in the late nineteenth century, he could foresee a time in which the land of that continent might become living space into which the German race could expand. It was imagined that Germany’s colonial subjects – the black Africans of her new-found empire – would become the cheap labour of the German farmers. Those tribes unable or unwilling to accept their diminished status would face the industrial weapons that Göring knew would one day appear in the South-West. Those Africans who stood in the way of the German race simply had no future. Like his son fifty years later,
Dr Heinrich Göring understood that the weaker peoples of the earth were destined to fall prey to the stronger, and rightly so.

These beliefs were hardly controversial in certain political circles in the late nineteenth-century Europe. But in Germany, some writers and politicians began to draw the distinction between Europeans and what Hitler was later to call ‘colonial peoples’ much closer to home. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, they began to argue that Germany’s destiny was to become the masters of an empire built on the continent of Europe itself. Germany was too late to take her share of Africa or Asia, but just over her eastern borders, in the lands of the Slavic peoples of Poland and Russia, was all the space she would ever need.

The Göring family perfectly encapsulates that shift in German colonial ambitions. Both father and son were committed imperialists. The father spent his brief colonial career struggling with pitiful resources to construct the most meagre foundations of a colony in the deserts of South-West Africa. More than half a century later, his son commanded the industrial energies of an expanded and mobilised Reich, and forged a short-lived but genocidal empire in the European East. While the father, whose prospective victims were black Africans, fits our view of a colonialist, the son does not. Yet the Nazis’ war in the East was one of imperial expansion, settler colonialism and racial genocide.

Today that war is commonly portrayed as an epic military disaster. The battles of Kursk, Leningrad and Stalingrad are now well known, but behind the lines, in civilian areas under German control, another war was fought. Land was cleared, crops confiscated and millions enslaved. Whole villages were simply wiped off the map in punitive raids, just as thousands of villages in Africa, Asia and the Americas had been during the centuries of colonial expansion. In the fertile Ukraine, ethnic German farmers settled on the land of Ukrainian families. In many cases they were simply transplanted into the homes of Ukrainian Slavs, given their houses along with their contents, while the previous
owners were driven into the camps. In Berlin, rooms full of bureaucrats spent their days planning the resettlement of millions more Germans at the expense of millions more Slavs and Jews.

Throughout the grim process of colonisation, Hitler, in his underground bunker in an East Prussian forest, sat late into the night describing to his captive audience of generals and party apparatchiks the wonders of the empire that was just beginning to emerge. He spoke endlessly of the great radial autobahns that would link the new Eastern settlements to Berlin and of the new breed of farmer soldiers who would become the masters of the East – the overlords of the Slavic hordes. Millions of those subhumans would need to be liquidated and the rest reduced to a primitive existence – denied medicine, education and even the most basic rights. If, like the natives of previous empires, they dared to resist the will of their masters, their villages would simply be bombed from the air.

The Nazi war to build an empire in the East was classically colonial in that it was characterised by genocidal violence, much of which – particularly that ranged against Slavic civilians and Soviet POWs – has been largely forgotten. Colonial genocide has always been a drawn-out process of massacres, famines, enslavement and hidden liquidations. A form of warfare without glory or glamour, it has never been the stuff of memoirs. The wars that built the British and French empires, that kept the rubber flowing in the Belgian Congo, that cleared the Pampas of Argentina and the Great Plains of the US, have similarly been overshadowed by an alternative and more glamorous history of colonialism, focusing on great battles and notable heroic figures.

The empires of Germany’s Second and Third Reichs died soon after birth. The former took with it hundreds of thousands of lives; the latter, millions. Both were inspired by a nationalist and racial fantasy that began in the late nineteenth century. What was forgotten at Nuremberg and has been forgotten ever since is that the imperial ambitions and many of the crimes committed
by the Third Reich have a precedent in German history. The nightmare that was visited upon the people of Eastern Europe in the 1940s was unique in its scale and in the industrialisation of killing. The fusion of racism and Fordism was a Nazi innovation. Yet in many other respects, Germany had been here before.

Five thousand miles from Nuremberg lies the tiny Namibian town of Lüderitz. Trapped between the freezing waters of the South Atlantic and the endless dune fields of the Namib Desert, it is without doubt one of the strangest places on earth. The sea of sand dunes stops literally on the edge of town; they seem encamped, as if waiting for permission to enter. In the mornings, when the desert is screened behind a thick curtain of sea mist, Lüderitz looks completely un-tropical. It resembles an overgrown Arctic research station or a defunct whaling settlement, perhaps in the Falkland Islands or Greenland. Even on a good day the town looks half dead.

Most of the buildings are brightly painted in reds, oranges and yellows, and are randomly scattered over the half-dozen or so hills that surround the wide and blustery bay. The vivid colours of the buildings contrast with the sea-weathered rocks of the hills, which resemble wrinkled and dusty elephant hide. Recently the main avenues have been tarmacked, but the back alleys remain rough and pitted dirt tracks. Everywhere piles of dust and sand linger on street corners. A visitor arriving by ship would see nothing to indicate they were in Africa. On landing, their confusion would be compounded by a white population speaking German and hundreds of black Africans speaking the Afrikaans of the Boers.

Today most visitors to Lüderitz arrive by road. The B4 highway, an arrow-straight ribbon of black tarmac, shoots across the Namib Desert following the line of the old narrow-gauge railway that once connected the southern settlements of what was then German South-West Africa to Lüderitz Bay and from there
to the great shipping lanes of Imperial Germany. Each night, out beyond the town limits, the sand dunes inch their way onto the tarmac of the B4, in their nightly attempt to suffocate the town. Each morning a huge yellow excavation machine thunders out of town to clear the highway. The desert itself seems determined to seal Lüderitz off from the outside world. Like the forests of the Congo as witnessed by Joseph Conrad, the dunes of the Namib seem to be waiting with ‘ominous patience … for the passing away of a fantastic invasion’.
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In 1905 this tiny settlement was chosen as the site of a new experiment in warfare. Until perhaps only thirty years ago, Lüderitz’s oldest residents had their own memories of what happened here in the first years of the twentieth century; they said nothing. Today it remains a secret. The tourist information office on Bismarck Strasse has nothing to say on the subject, none of the guidebooks to Namibia mention it and most of the history books they recommend as further reading are similarly mute. Yet what happened in Lüderitz between 1905 and 1907 makes it one of the pivotal sites in the history of the twentieth century.

The experiment took place on Shark Island, a squat, mean-looking ridge of rock that lies just across the bay, in full view of the whole town. It was in its way a resounding success, bringing to life a new device: a military innovation that went on to become an emblem of the century and take more lives than the atom bomb. For here, on the southern edge of Africa, the death camp was invented.

Today Shark Island is the municipal camping site for the town of Lüderitz. A new restaurant overlooking the island offers excellent South African wines and South Atlantic seafood. Diners are encouraged to sit out on the balcony and enjoy views of an island upon which, a century ago, three and a half thousand Africans were systematically liquidated. Just a couple of hundred yards away, beneath the waters of Lüderitz Bay, divers have reported Shark Island to be surrounded by a ring of human bones and rusted steel manacles. The human beings who were made to wear those chains and whose remains lie beneath the
waves have been almost erased from Namibian and world history. The names of their tribes – the Herero, Witbooi Nama, Bethanie Nama – mean nothing to most people outside of Namibia.

Shark Island is not Namibia’s only secret. There is a mass grave under the sidings of the railway station in the Namibian capital, Windhoek, and another on the outskirts of the seaside holiday town of Swakopmund. The national museum itself is housed in a German fort which was built on the site of another concentration camp.

But for most, Namibia is seen as a quaint backwater, a relic of Germany’s short-lived foray into colonialism, and a microcosm of late nineteenth-century Germany that has somehow survived intact into the twenty-first. In the gift shops tourists buy postcards and picture books that depict this lost idyll. Streets are named after military commanders from aristocratic families. In the shopping malls one can buy replica hats of the
Schutztruppe
, the German colonial army. They come emblazoned with the red, white and black insignia of Germany’s Second Reich – the age of the Kaisers. The German imperial flag, with its severe black eagle, is also for sale, alongside local history books that skirt over the wars that were fought under that banner – wars that almost wiped out two of Namibia’s indigenous peoples.

What Germany’s armies and civilian administrators did in Namibia is today a lost history, but the Nazis knew it well. When the
Schutztruppe
attempted to exterminate the Herero and Nama peoples of Namibia a century ago, Hitler was a schoolboy of fifteen. In 1904, he lived in a continent that was electrified by the stories of German heroism and African barbarism emanating from what was then German South-West Africa.

Eighteen years after the Herero-Nama genocide, Hitler became closely associated with a veteran of the conflict. In 1922 he was recruited into an ultra-right-wing militia in Munich that was indirectly under the command of the charismatic General Franz von Epp, who had been a lieutenant during Germany’s wars against the Herero and Nama. As both a young colonial
soldier and, later, a leading member of the Nazi party, von Epp was a fervent believer in the
Lebensraum
theory, and spent his life propagating the notion that the German people needed to expand their living space at the expense of lower races, whether in Africa or Eastern Europe. It would be an exaggeration to claim that Hitler was von Epp’s protégé, but in the chaos of post-World War I Munich, von Epp, perhaps more than any figure other than Hitler himself, made the Nazi party possible. It was through von Epp, in various convoluted ways, that Hitler met many of the men who were to become the elite of the party: von Epp’s deputy was Ernst Röhm, the founder of the Nazi storm troopers. Via the party’s connections to von Epp and other old soldiers of Germany’s African colonies, Röhm and Hitler were able to procure a consignment of surplus colonial
Schutztruppe
uniforms. Designed for warfare on the golden savannah of Africa, the shirts were desert brown in colour: the Nazi street thugs who wore them became known as Brown Shirts.

Today von Epp is viewed as a minor player in the story of Nazism. When the party came to power in 1933, his role was to campaign for the return of the colonies lost at Versailles for which he had fought as a young man. But by 1939 von Epp had become a marginal figure, excluded from Hitler’s inner circle and eclipsed by younger men. His critical role in the development of the party as a political force has been overlooked. Yet in his writings before the war, Hitler recognised the role von Epp had played. In countless pictures and party propaganda films, von Epp and Hitler stand side by side.

In the last pictures taken of him, von Epp sits next to Hermann Göring. Both have been stripped of their uniforms and decorations as they await trial under American custody at Mondorf-les-Bains. The old general looks gaunt, slumped back in his chair squinting at the photographer. A generation older than many of his fellow inmates, von Epp died in custody just weeks after those pictures were taken. Had he lived to stand trial alongside Göring, might von Epp’s testimony have led the prosecutors to see the continuities between the genocide he had taken
part in as a young infantry lieutenant and the acts of the Third Reich?

Today the memory of Germany’s empire has become detached from European history. Nineteenth-century colonialism has long been viewed as a specialist subject, a historical annexe in which events were played out in near-complete isolation from Europe. Yet in colonial history, ideas, methods and individuals always moved in both directions. Hitler’s 1941 statement that he would treat the Slavs ‘like a colonial people’ has lost its resonance, but for the Führer it was a phrase full of meaning, a shorthand readily understood by a generation of Nazis who were boys when the Kaiser sent his armies to Africa to destroy native rebels who had placed themselves in the path of Germany’s racial destiny. Our understanding of what Nazism was and where its underlying ideas and philosophies came from is perhaps incomplete unless we explore what happened in Africa under Kaiser Wilhelm II.