Kaiser's Holocaust (29 page)

In April 1905, seven months after hostilities had begun, von Trotha decided to base himself in the south and take personal command over the campaign. Constrained by his narrow imagination and devoted to his simplistic view of Africans, von Trotha merely replicated the approach he had used against the Herero, issuing the Nama with an edict not dissimilar to the Extermination Order of 1904. Issued on 23 April 1905, von Trotha’s declaration, describing the Nama using the pejorative ‘Hottentot’ and written in the same bizarre pidgin as the Extermination Order, warned Hendrik Witbooi and his people that they would suffer a similar fate to the Herero should they continue to fight:

Von Trotha also placed a price in the head of the Nama leaders, offering thousands of marks ‘to whoever delivers these murderers, dead or alive’. Neither this financial inducement nor the proclamation itself had any effect on the course of the war; they were an indication of von Trotha’s growing desperation.

By the middle of 1905, the number of Nama conducting operations in the field was no more than around 1,500, and von Trotha’s inability to defeat or capture such a small force of African insurgents was becoming increasingly embarrassing to the German Chief of Staff and the Colonial Department. The settlers – once von Trotha’s greatest admirers – began to turn against him. With thousands of Herero still unaccounted for in the north and the entire south consumed by the Nama insurgency, the decisive blow that von Trotha promised would crush the ‘rebellious Africans’ had clearly failed to materialise. By the summer of 1905, the hero of 1904 had come to be seen as an inflexible militarist whose policies were a threat to the colonial economy. At the very moment that his stature and reputation were under attack, General von Trotha suffered two personal calamities. In June 1905 Lieutenant Thilo von Trotha, the General’s nephew to whom he was particularly close, was killed in a clash with the Bethanie Nama.
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Soon afterwards von Trotha’s wife died in Germany. The assurance and confidence that had marked von Trotha’s first months in command now began to escape him. In late September 1905 he wrote to the Kaiser requesting that he be relieved of his command, once an appropriate successor was found.
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At the beginning of July 1905, General von Trotha and his commanders were consumed with their own dilemmas and had no idea that Hendrik Witbooi and his men were in a desperate state. Despite all their military successes, they had been forced to take refuge at Tsoachaib, a dry and desolate riverbed about 30 miles west of Gibeon, where at least a hundred Witbooi men, women and children were struggling to survive.
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It was winter and freezing winds blew down the Naukluft Mountains 25 miles away. They had little food and no tobacco to numb the pain of their injuries. Hendrik’s deputy Samuel Izaak was particularly ill, weakened by malnutrition and half poisoned by bad water. As his condition worsened, he pleaded with Hendrik Witbooi to enter into peace negotiations with the Germans. Exhausted by almost a year at war, Hendrik’s brother Peter and many of the elder men agreed. The prospect of surrender was strongly opposed by the younger men who had witnessed the battle of the Waterberg and the massacres of Herero that followed. They were championed by Hendrik Witbooi’s son Isaak. In mid-July, in the midst of their internal debate, a messenger arrived at Tsoachaib with a letter from the German military authorities that urged Hendrik to surrender. On 27 July, addressing the German District Commissioner for the southern district of Keetmanshoop, Hendrik responded as follows:

A month later and just over a year into the war, Hendrik Witbooi and his men, having recovered some of their strength,
were on the offensive again, attacking German convoys and raiding farms across the south. On 29 October 1905 they launched an attack on a German supply convoy near the town of Fahlgras in central-eastern Namaland. During the attack Hendrik Witbooi was hit in the thigh by a shard of shrapnel. The German soldiers who watched through binoculars later described Hendrik staggering to his horse and fleeing the battlefield, accompanied by his men.

With their leader seriously wounded and bleeding profusely, the Witbooi made a dash for the border with British Bechuanaland, but after three days in the saddle, Hendrik collapsed east of Khoes and just 30 miles from British territory. His last words were reported to have been, ‘It is enough now, the children shall have peace.’ Hendrik Witbooi’s body was wrapped in a blanket. A Bible was placed on his chest and he was lowered into an unmarked grave. Fearing that the body would be exhumed by German soldiers, his men drove their cattle over the grave to conceal it.
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The death of Hendrik Witbooi marked the beginning of the slow disintegration of the Nama alliance. A few days after his burial, the Witbooi fighters, along with the members of other Nama clans who had joined them, held a meeting in the desert to debate their next course of action. On his father’s death, leadership of the Witbooi fell to Hendrik’s eldest son Isaak. He and many of the younger Witbooi men wanted to continue the fight. However, Samuel Izaak, for three decades Hendrik’s under-
Kaptein
and a highly respected elder, favoured negotiations. At dawn the next morning, the young men under Isaak Witbooi rode off to continue the war, alongside Jacob Morenga and the other Nama bands. Samuel Izaak and the majority of the Witbooi clan, along with their allies the Veldschoendragers, set out for the small town of Berseba some 60 miles away. Home to the Khari-Khauan, a community of Nama who had remained loyal to the Germans throughout the war, Berseba was neutral territory.
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On 20 November, having first written to the German authorities
to discuss the possibility of surrender, Samuel Izaak and his men handed themselves over to the German Station Commander at Berseba, Lieutenant von Westernhagen. On the date of their capitulation, the Nama force under Samuel Izaak consisted of seventy-four men and sixty-five women and children. Lieutenant von Westernhagen – a junior officer without the authority to accept the Witbooi surrender – telegrammed his superior, Major Ludwig von Estorff. On 21 November von Estorff eagerly accepted Samuel Izaak’s terms, without qualification or delay. To ensure his actions were acceptable to his superiors, von Estorff sent a telegram to his commander, Colonel Dame, who promptly approved.

The undignified haste with which von Estorff and Dame accepted Samuel Izaak’s surrender is an indication of the terrible state of the German army in the south. By November 1905, many of the army’s depots stood practically empty, supplies of ammunition were running low and much of the war material the Germans needed to maintain their force in the field was in transit from Germany. The death of Hendrik Witbooi and the surrender of Samuel Izaak suddenly and unexpectedly offered the Germans a glimmer of hope. It held out the prospect that the Nama alliance might dissolve and that the remaining Nama bands might surrender, bringing the war finally to an end.
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The news of Hendrik Witbooi’s death came too late for von Trotha. On 2 November, the Kaiser had finally approved his request and the general had been relieved of his command. As he arrived in the port of Lüderitz, to board a ship back to Germany, von Trotha received a telegram announcing the death of Hendrik Witbooi. He claimed to have thanked the messenger who brought the telegram with the words, ‘This is the best news you could have brought me.’
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On 19 November 1905, a guard of honour assembled on the Lüderitz harbour and almost the entire white population gathered to say farewell to General von Trotha. In a speech to the assembled crowd, the man who had promised he would vanquish rebellious African tribes with ‘rivers of blood and money’ told the people of Lüderitz, ‘In this land I have lost everything
that was dear to me in life.’

On his return to Germany von Trotha was awarded the Pour le Mérite, the highest military order of the day, and was thanked personally and wholeheartedly by the Kaiser for his loyal service. The German High Command, in its Official History of the Herero War, stated that the ‘devoted service and self-sacrifice that Lieutenant General von Trotha rendered for Kaiser and Reich deserves the warmest gratitude of the fatherland’.
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