Kaiser's Holocaust (33 page)

In one of Düring’s snapshots a boy of about five years, his stomach bloated from malnutrition, his only clothing a torn sleeveless vest, stares at the ground. In another, even more disturbing image, Düring’s companion, Dr Gühne, poses among the prisoners. Wearing his military tunic, he stands rigid and poised, walking cane in hand, a group of ragged, frightened Herero women at his feet.

Many photographs taken by German officers during the war contain images of African prisoners or servants being humiliated. Some were published as postcards and were often captioned with sarcastic comments, a visual form of
Schadenfreude
– the ‘malicious delight in the misfortunes of others’.
12
In the colonial context, such photographs were a symbol of German power and African submission. The last image Düring took on Shark Island shows a naked, adolescent Herero girl standing in a tiny shack, probably the interior of the guards’ shelter shown in the earlier image. Squeezed between the girl’s thighs, in an unconscious effort to retain some semblance of dignity, are the torn remains of her dress that had been ripped from her body.

As in all the camps, rape was common on Shark Island, and the sexual exploitation of Herero women was not merely accepted – it was actively celebrated. Lieutenant Düring’s photograph was one of many pornographic and semi-pornographic images taken of African women by German soldiers during the war. Some were made into postcards and sent to Germany or otherwise distributed in the colony.
13
One officer, Georg Auer, took several pictures of naked African women which he later published along with his diary.
14

These postcards celebrating the extermination of the Herero and Nama or revelling in their powerlessness were in wide circulation. The British diamond prospector Fred Cornell recalled encountering some during his time in Lüderitz and on his travels across southern Namaland during 1905 and 1906:

On the morning of 9 September 1906, after three days in the dark, fetid hold of a Woermann Line steamer, almost two thousand Nama prisoners were offloaded at Lüderitz harbour. They were marched in single file along the shore, towards the narrow causeway leading to Shark Island. Two-thirds were women and children.

It was only as they crested the highest peak of Shark Island by the lighthouse that they saw their destination. Over a thousand Herero prisoners crouched among the rocks behind three layers of barbed wire. They were emaciated, traumatised and – as the Nama arrived – struggling as best they could to warm themselves in the sunlight.

With the arrival of the Nama from the north, the population of Shark Island outnumbered the white population of Lüderitz, then only about twelve hundred strong. Already weakened by six months of captivity and hard labour in the north, the Nama suffered a rapid deterioration in their health within just weeks of their arrival. On 5 October 1906, less than a month after they had arrived, Missionary Laaf wrote: ‘Large numbers of the people are sick, mostly from scurvy, and every week around 15 to 20 [Nama] die … of the Herero just as many are dying, so that a weekly average of 50 is counted.’
16

In another letter, written just two and a half months later, Laaf reported that death rates had dramatically escalated: ‘The dying among the Nama is frighteningly high. There are often days where as many as 18 people die. Today Samuel Izaak told Brother Nyhof:
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“The community is doomed.” If it continues
like this, it will not be long before the entire people has completely died out.’
18

As in the camps at Swakopmund, the health of the prisoners was severely undermined by the cold coastal climate. Lüderitz lies 450 miles further south and has an even colder climate. In the Shark Island camp, exposed on three sides to the South Atlantic winds, night-time temperatures plummeted to little above freezing. With only makeshift huts of rags and sacking for shelter, the prisoners struggled to keep themselves from freezing. One survivor described ‘the night air on the sea’ as ‘bitterly cold’; ‘the damp sea fogs drenched us and made our teeth chatter’.
19

The health of the Nama on Shark Island was further undermined by malnutrition. As in the other camps, their rations consisted mainly of uncooked rice and flour; occasionally they received a little meat from horses or oxen that had died of disease or exhaustion. Cornell reported that food was so scarce on Shark Island that when rations were distributed the prisoners ‘fought like wild animals and killed each other’ to secure a share. With so many prisoners on Shark Island, the few alternative sources of food – oysters, sea urchins, seaweed and limpets – were quickly exhausted as prisoners scavenged at the water’s edge hunting for anything vaguely edible.
20

From the very start, the plight of the Nama was brought to the attention of the colonial authorities in Windhoek. Just a week after they arrived, Colonel von Deimling, the Commander of Military Operations in South-West Africa, wrote a secret letter to Governor von Lindequist imploring him to have the Nama evacuated from Shark Island: ‘Since the Colonial Department had ruled out deportations the only feasible option is to place them in a reservation, because they cannot possibly stay in permanent captivity on Shark Island.’ Von Deimling’s request was refused.
21

The Nama were not simply left to die on Shark Island. They were systematically worked to death. The records show that by October 1906, only weeks after their arrival, the Nama prisoners had been deployed as forced labour in the construction of a new quay in Lüderitz harbour. The German harbour engineer,
Richard Müller, who supervised the project, kept a meticulous diary of the works and sent numerous progress reports to his employers in Swakopmund.
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According to Müller’s records, he had at his disposal around three hundred Nama labourers at any given time. It seems that all available Nama labour on Shark Island was mobilised, regardless of gender. Only young children were spared work.

The labourers were made to haul large stones across the island and drag them into the freezing waters of the bay to form the foundations of the quay. All work was done by hand, and prisoners were forced to stand knee-high in the freezing waters for much of the day. Possibly out of principle, the women were not made to work in the water. Eyewitnesses describe how each evening the women would receive their men, half-frozen and exhausted, and massage their limbs back to life.

As early as 30 November 1906, Engineer Müller’s reports to the Harbour Division reveal that the number of
Arbeitsfähige
– ‘work-able’ – Nama had shrunk to around a hundred prisoners, and that the majority were sick or dying. Between November 1906 and January 1907, the situation worsened. More prisoners fell ill and Müller became increasingly frustrated and concerned that the reduction in his allotted supply of labour would undermine the whole project. On Christmas Eve 1906, Müller submitted the following status report:

In mid-February 1907 the Harbour Division abandoned the project altogether, as 70 percent of the Nama on Shark Island were dead. Of those still alive, a third were so sick that the camp commander believed that they were likely to ‘die in the near future’.
24

There can be no question that the colonial authorities in South-West Africa knew that the Nama recently sent to Shark Island were dying in large numbers. In the files of the colonial government relating to the Witbooi Nama, there are copies of letters sent by the Lüderitz-based Missionary Emil Laaf and his colleague at Keetmanshoop, Missionary Fenschel, to the Rhenish Mission Society headquarters in Germany. These letters were, it appears, subsequently forwarded to the Colonial Department. Officials made copies, which they marked
Vertraulich
– confidential – and sent to their colleagues in the colonial administration of South-West Africa. The missionaries’ correspondence was clearly read in both Berlin and Windhoek. Officials in both capitals were informed, in no uncertain terms, that within weeks of their arrival the Nama had begun to die and that the entire people were doomed if they were not evacuated or conditions in the camp ameliorated.

What the surviving records also reveal is that not only were Governor von Lindequist, and his deputy Oskar Hintrager, aware of the death rate on Shark Island, but when attempts were made by the missionaries and military commanders to have the Nama evacuated, they repeatedly and deliberately obstructed them.

In December 1906 Heinrich Fenschel, a Rhenish missionary based in the southern town of Keetmanshoop, 200 miles from Lüderitz, approached Colonel von Deimling, Head of the
Schutztruppe
, about the fate of the Nama on Shark Island. Von Deimling was, it seems, surprised by what Fenschel told him about the make-up of the prisoners on Shark Island. During their meeting, he admitted that ‘It had never dawned on me that there are more women than men there’. Fenschel asked von Deimling to move the prisoners, especially the women and children, off the island, and the colonel promised to ‘make arrangements immediately’.
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Yet by January, Colonel von Deimling appeared to have changed his mind and had taken no action. Undeterred, the two Lüderitz-based missionaries, Brothers Emil Laaf and Hermann Nyhof, turned their attentions to Commander von Zülow, head of the
Etappenkommando
in Lüderitz, in the hope that he might lobby Colonel von Deimling for the relocation of Nama to a more benign environment. According to Nyhof, von Deimling told Commander von Zülow, ‘As long as I am in power, the Nama will not be removed from the island.’
26
In the
Missionary Chronicles
for Lüderitz for 1907, Colonel von Deimling was blamed for the continued suffering of the Shark Island prisoners. However, unknown to the missionaries, von Deimling had already attempted to have some prisoners removed from Shark Island.

In February 1907, following his meeting with Heinrich Fenschel, von Deimling had ordered 230 Nama women and children off the island and into a sheltered valley at the entrance to the town, used mostly by the many South African transport riders. From there, he hoped to have them shipped back to the inland concentration camps at Okahandja and Karibib.
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Von Deimling waited until the last moment before informing the civilian colonial authorities, and on 19 February 1907 he sent a letter asking for final approval for this plan.
28
As Governor von Lindequist was in Berlin, supporting the passage of a new colonial budget through the Reichstag, his Deputy Governor Oskar Hintrager received von Deimling’s communiqué. He replied: ‘I sincerely ask that the relocation of Nama women and children to Damaraland [Hereroland] be cancelled and also that the women and children removed from Shark Island be taken back.’
29

A fanatic advocate of German settler colonialism, Hintrager believed the security of white settlers and the reputation of German colonialism would be jeopardised if prisoners who had experienced the horrors of Shark Island were allowed to ‘spread their stories of hate and mistrust against us’.
30
On these grounds, they were effectively sentenced to death.

Hintrager’s determination to keep the Nama on Shark Island is all the more remarkable for the fact that he had seen at first
hand the horrors of concentration camps. In 1900, Hintrager had fought against the British in the Transvaal during the Boer War and knew what Lord Kitchener’s concentration camps had done to Boer civilians. Yet he took measures intended to ensure that the slow extermination of the Nama prisoners on Shark Island continued, despite the pleas of the missionaries and the requests of army officers.

When Hintrager rejected von Deimling’s appeal, it seems that Governor von Lindequist still harboured hopes that what remained of the Nama might eventually be shipped abroad, completely eradicating them from German South-West Africa. In a Memorandum to Government on 12 December 1906, he personally insisted that the regime of exposure, malnutrition and forced labour continue unabated on Shark Island in order to reduce the numbers who might eventually be sent into exile: