Kaiser's Holocaust (34 page)

Von Lindequist was no doubt aware that the deportation of the Nama to any of Germany’s tropical colonies would probably result in their extinction. In January 1904, eighty Witbooi, who had been fighting for the Germans against the Herero in the north, were arrested when Hendrik Witbooi declared war. They were deported to the German colony of Togo, where half of them died of tropical disease and forced labour. Their suffering was so extreme that the German authorities in Togo refused to take responsibility for the deaths and eventually returned forty-two of them to South-West Africa.

The slow extermination of the Nama on Shark Island was not the result of poor coordination, inadequate logistics, accidental neglect or administrative incompetence. When von Lindequist transferred the Nama to Shark Island in September 1906, the concentration-camp system had been in operation for twenty
months. It was eighteen months since District Commissioner Dr Fuchs had written an official report that unequivocally stated that the death rate at Swakopmund was a result of overwork, and the lack of blankets, food, shelter and basic medical care. The fatal effects of the camps could be seen in Windhoek and on Shark Island itself. It could not have come as any surprise to von Lindequist that when the same system was unleashed upon the Nama, the effects were similarly lethal.

The majority of prisoners in the other concentration camps and working on the railways eventually became victims of their captivity, with mortality rates ranging between 40 and 60 percent. From the time of its inception under von Trotha to the eventual closing of the camp in April 1907, mortality on Shark Island consistently exceeded the other camps. Prisoners sent to Shark Island could only have been expected to die. The German garrison in Lüderitz called the camp ‘Death Island’. This phrase was even used in an official report by Commander von Zülow of the
Etappenkommando
.
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Although the Nama on Shark Island were used as slave labour, the equanimity with which this resource was squandered strongly suggests that forced labour was a secondary function of the Shark Island camp. The camp’s main focus from September 1906 onwards was the extermination of Nama prisoners. Nama deaths were the ‘product’ of the Shark Island camp; forced labour was merely one of the means by which those deaths were brought about. Shark Island was a death camp, perhaps the world’s first.

The British Military Attaché to South-West Africa, Colonel Frederick Trench, independently came to the conclusion that the function of Shark Island was to liquidate as many of the Nama as possible, and perhaps even exterminate them as a race. Between 1905 and 1907 Colonel Trench was in regular contact with the chief administrators of German South-West Africa, including von Lindequist and Oskar Hintrager. In a report sent to the British embassy in Berlin on 21 November 1906 Trench claimed that the Germans’ ultimate aim was the eradication of
the Nama, in order to make the colony safe for white settlement:

While there is no doubt that von Lindequist and much of the colonial administration in Windhoek were complicit in the liquidation of the Nama on Shark Island, how much was known in the national government in Berlin? Again there can be little question that news of what was happening on Shark Island had reached leading members of the Colonial Department and Chancellor von Bülow’s government.

The letters of Missionary Laaf, sent in October and December 1906, outlining conditions at Shark Island, were read by the new Head of the Colonial Department, Bernhardt Dernburg, and by November 1906 rumours of the conditions on Shark Island were known to have been circulating in Berlin. In December, while the missionaries were lobbying Colonel von Deimling to bring the Nama women and children off Shark Island, Georg Lebedour, a deputy of the Social Democratic party, raised the issue in the Reichstag. An anonymous correspondent described only as a ‘concerned citizen in Lüderitz’ had written to the socialist newspaper the
Koenigsberger Volkszeitung
reporting that ‘Around 2,000 [Nama] are presently under German imprisonment. They surrendered against the guarantee of life, but were nevertheless transferred to Shark Island in Lüderitz, where, as a doctor ensured me, they will all die within two years due to the climate.’
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Lebedour read passages from the
Koenigsberger Volkszeitung
article to the collected deputies. Chancellor von Bülow and Dernburg, the Head of the Colonial Department, were present in the chamber, and Lebedour directly challenged them to inform the Reichstag of ‘the extent of mortality rates on Shark Island and in other camps’. Thanks to Lebedour, it was impossible for
either to claim ignorance on the matter after December 1906.
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Georg Lebedour was not a lone voice in the Reichstag. His ambush of Chancellor von Bülow’s government was part of a concerted campaign by the left and centre parties to block the passage of a colonial budget that sanctioned additional funds for German South-West Africa. In the same debate, Lebedour claimed that the government, influenced by the settlers and their supporters in Berlin, was exploiting the war in order to increase the colonial budgets and seize ‘native’ land. ‘The farmer lobby’, he warned the chamber, ‘are wishing, hoping and working towards the continuation of the war in the hope that the land of the natives will ultimately be confiscated.’ He continued: ‘It is tantamount to recklessness that the Government allows such people to drag it around by the nose and that it complies with these incomprehensible policies that will, inevitably, lead to the annihilation of some of the natives and the total slavery of others.’
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The Reichstag debates of November and December 1906 led to a bitter impasse and finally the defeat of the colonial budget. This in turn forced Chancellor von Bülow’s government to seek re-election the following year, in what became known as the Hottentot election. Not only did the horrors of Shark Island become well known in Germany, but the parties of the left and their millions of supporters were genuinely horrified by the activities of their government and the army in South-West Africa. Despite the influence of the colonial lobby and their potent propaganda campaign, support for the settlers and von Bülow’s government was far from universal. On the issue of colonialism, as in much else, Wilhelmian Germany was a deeply divided nation. The leader of the Social Democrats, August Bebel, spoke for many on the left when he stated that ‘under some circumstances’ colonialism was ‘a great cultural mission’, in which Europeans could ‘come to foreign peoples as liberators, as friends and educators’. In late 1906 he and his party, along with the Socialists, were convinced that what Germany was
engaged in on Shark Island was not the cultural mission of colonialism but a war of extermination.

While the colonial authorities in Windhoek and their supporters in Berlin did everything they could to deny that Shark Island was a place of extermination, the officers who ran the camp did surprisingly little to disguise it – or to conceal the bodies of its victims. The concentration camp was clearly visible from the town. German settlers looking from the windows of their homes and passengers on ships arriving and departing Lüderitz harbour would have been able to see the figures of the Nama and Herero scrambling on the rocks. Likewise the prisoners could see the lights of Lüderitz and hear the sounds of normal life just across the harbour, as they sat frozen in their shelters at night. The prisoners working on the new quay did so in full view of the public. So Governor von Lindequist’s administration could not have been surprised when news of their suffering leaked to the German and eventually the foreign press.

Even more remarkable was the fact that the camp authorities made only half-hearted efforts to dispose of the bodies of those who died. An estimated eight to seventeen prisoners were dying on Shark Island each day. The accumulation of so many bodies, from a small camp situated not far from the centre of a town of only twelve hundred white residents, was not easy to overlook. Many were simply dumped into the sea. Leslie Cruikshank Bartlet, another of the South African transport riders who passed through the bay, came to Lüderitz in mid-1905 and witnessed the consequences:

Other bodies were buried in shallow graves around Lüderitz and in the deserts beyond. Some of these mass graves have recently come to light. However, anticipating the concentration camps of the Third Reich, some of the dead of Shark Island became a resource exploited in the name of medical and racial science.

In the course of the war, an industry had developed around the supply of body parts. In the Swakopmund concentration camp in 1905, female prisoners were forced to boil the severed heads of their own people and scrape the flesh, sinews and ligaments off the skulls with shards of broken glass. The victims may have been people they had known or even relatives. The skulls were then placed into crates by the German soldiers and shipped to museums, collections and universities in Germany. This practice was so widespread and accepted in South-West Africa that in 1905 it was depicted on a postcard. Clearly a retouched photograph, it shows five soldiers leaning over a line of skulls packed neatly in a wooden crate. One is carefully placing the final skull into the crate while his comrades pose with their pipes or smile at the camera.
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In June 1905 the German racial anthropologist Felix von Luschan had begun a correspondence with Ralph Zürn, the lieutenant in Okahandja whose aggression towards the Herero had helped spark the outbreak of war. Disappointed with the Herero skull Zürn had donated to him following his removal from the colony in 1904, von Luschan enquired about the possibility of acquiring further specimens. Zürn made some enquires of his own before assuring von Luschan that ‘in the concentration camps taking and preserving the skulls of Herero prisoners of war will be more readily possible than in the country, where there is always the danger of offending the ritual feelings of the natives’.
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By the time the Nama were incarcerated on Shark Island, the dissecting and exportation of prisoners’ bodies was no longer the prerogative of corrupt soldiers like Ralph Zürn. The process had become more professional and scientifically rigorous. Towards the end of 1906 the bodies of seventeen Nama
prisoners, including that of a one-year-old girl, were carefully decapitated by the camp physician at Shark Island, Dr Bofinger. After breaking open the skulls, Bofinger removed and weighed the brains, before placing each head in preserving alcohol and sealing them in tins for export to the Institute of Pathology at the University of Berlin. There they were used by the aspiring racial scientist Christian Fetzer, then still a medical student, in a series of experiments designed to demonstrate the anatomical similarities between the Nama and the anthropoid ape.
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As well as preparing human remains for scientists in Germany, Dr Bofinger used the inmates of Shark Island for his own research. His area of study was scurvy, a fatal disease, the precise cause of which – an acute deficiency of vitamin C – had yet to be discovered in the early years of the twentieth century. The British had long known they could prevent the condition among the sailors of the Royal Navy by compelling them to eat sauerkraut and drink lemon juice. Outside the British Empire these practices had yet to catch on, and a lingering belief that scurvy was associated with bad hygiene or perhaps tainted meat had led doctors to look elsewhere for a cure. As many of the prisoners in Lüderitz suffered from bleeding gums and aching joints – classic symptoms of the condition – and were dying at an appalling rate, Dr Bofinger concluded that ‘the Herero and Nama prisoners handed over to me for treatment in Lüderitzbucht offered plenty of opportunity to observe several hundred cases of scurvy’.
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But Bofinger’s research was founded on the entirely false premise that scurvy was a contagious condition, spread through some form of bacterial transmission. Convinced that the disease was a major cause of death among the prisoners on Shark Island and that the squalor of the camp was helping to spread the disease, Dr Bofinger initiated a series of medical trials in which a range of substances, including arsenic and opium, were injected into living prisoners. He then determined the effects of these substances ‘by opening up the dead bodies’ in medical autopsies.