Kaiser's Holocaust (39 page)

Nevertheless, in 1913 Eugen Fischer published the results of his study in a book entitled
Die Rehobother Bastards und das
Bastardierungsproblem beim Menschen
(The Rehoboth Bastards and the Bastardisation problem in Man). Fischer claimed that his examinations of the people of Rehoboth showed that racial features and characteristics found in the Basters and inherited
from their Nama ancestors had, with each succeeding generation, become dominant over the traits inherited from their white forebears. The process of racial degeneration was stamped on their bodies and the story of the Rehoboth Basters demonstrated the universal truth that ‘every European people that has adopted the blood of inferior races – and that Negroes, Nama and many others are inferior only mad people would deny – has, without exception, atoned for the adoption of these inferior elements with their mental and cultural downfall’.
27

Even before the publication of his book, Fischer had begun to tour and lecture on his findings. On publication,
Die Rehobother
Bastards
helped Fischer establish himself quickly as Germany’s foremost expert on racial mixing. It was regarded as a breakthrough study, the first successful application of modern Mendelian genetics to human anthropology. The book was still in print in 1961.

Fischer was emerging as a front-rank German racial scientist at the moment the pseudo-science of eugenics, the invention of Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, was achieving an important place in German scientific discourse. The man chiefly responsible for the establishment of German eugenics was Alfred Ploetz, a passionate believer in the supremacy of the Aryan race. In the mid-1880s, Ploetz fused his ideas of Aryan supremacy with eugenics and began a crusade to preserve the purity of the Germanic people. In one of his books, he stated that the love of humanity ‘is nothing more than love for its Aryan part’.
28

As Ploetz had begun his studies before Francis Galton had devised the term ‘eugenics’, he called his science
Rassenhygiene
– race hygiene. Although Ploetz’s term lacks the elegance of Galton’s Greek etymology, it more accurately conveys the ideas of purity and pollution inherent in the eugenics movement. In 1895 Ploetz published his key book,
The Foundations of Racial
Hygiene
, and in 1904 he helped found the periodical Archiv für
Rassen-
und Gesellschaftsbiologie
(Archives of Race Science and Social Biology) and opened the Society for Racial Hygiene. In 1909 Galton agreed to become its honorary chairman. Eugen
Fischer, who had been involved in eugenics even before his time in German South-West Africa, was ideally placed to take up a leading position in the German eugenics revolution.

By 1910 Fischer was arguing that
Rassenhygiene
was the first step in ‘saving our wonderful German nation’, and that it was the duty of race scientists to convince the public of the intrinsic merit and importance of racial hygiene. Yet what allowed ideas like
Rassenhygiene
to gain ground in German society was not the proselytising of scientists like Eugen Fischer but the trauma of Germany’s defeat and humiliation in World War I. The disaster of the war and the ensuing chaos helped radicalise Germany’s race scientists and made German society more receptive to racial theories than ever before.
29

The Great War came to German South-West Africa in the early hours of 18 September 1914 when, under the cover of darkness, a flotilla of British and South African warships rounded the tip of Shark Island and quietly slipped into Lüderitz harbour. When the sun crested the rocky hills to the east of the town, revealing the harbour crowded with warships, panic caught hold of the local population. Men, still in their pyjamas, were seen running from their homes. A government official scurried through the streets carrying a box of official documents, and, with somewhat undignified haste, a white sheet was raised on a flagpole over the main jetty.
1

The commanders of the colony’s
Schutztruppe
, expecting an overland invasion by the army of the Union of South Africa, had dispatched the bulk of their forces in the south to their border on banks of the Orange River. Lüderitz, her people and her diamond fields had been left almost completely undefended. With the guns of the invasion fleet now ranged against the town, the mayor of Lüderitz Emil Kreplin, the resident judge Dr Dommer and the editor of the
Lüderitzbuchter
newspaper sailed out to the South African flagship. There, Mayor Kreplin formally surrendered Lüderitz to Colonel Beves of the Union army. By noon the next day the British Union flag had replaced the white sheet on the flagpole in Lüderitz harbour, and an invasion force of almost two thousand men had begun to come ashore and unload their equipment.

Six days later the
Armadale Castle
, an ocean liner belonging to the British-owned Union Castle Shipping Line and recently refitted as a warship, suddenly appeared off the coast of Swakopmund. Once in range she began to bombard the town,
aiming her fire at the only two facilities of any strategic importance: the long wooden jetty and the mast of Swakopmund’s long-range radio transmitter. Over the course of several raids, both were destroyed, and stray shells also landed on the Customs House and the offices of the Woermann Brock Company, a subsidiary arm of the Woermann Shipping Line. The day after the naval bombardment began, the German colonial authorities started to evacuate the civilian population inland. By 30 September, Swakopmund was effectively a ghost town. Tendrils of sand began to creep onto the wooden walkways and loiter in the doorways of shops and homes.

On Christmas Day 1914, a large force of South African soldiers landed at Walvis Bay, and two weeks later marched on Swakopmund. The only resistance the South Africans encountered came from a handful of German snipers, who fired a few volleys from the nearby sand dunes and remotely detonated a series of large mines, before making a hasty retreat. With the capture of both Lüderitz and Swakopmund, German South-West Africa was effectively sealed off from the ‘Fatherland’ and in the same months, similar fates befell Germany’s other colonies in Africa.

In August 1914, as 1 million German troops had swept through Belgium following the grand battle plan of the late Alfred von Schlieffen, Germany’s West African colony of Togo had also been invaded by French forces from Dahomey to the east and by British units from the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) to the west. The small German colonial police force had surrendered at the end of the month, giving the Western Allies the sort of quick victory that was good for morale and seemed to support the widespread conviction that the war in Europe would last only a few months. The invasion of German Cameroon was also well under way by the time Swakopmund fell to the South Africans. While the Belgian forces defending their homeland were being routed, their colonial units based in the Congo had marched into German territory from the south. French columns had also invaded German Cameroon from Chad and a British
force of four thousand West Africans, led by 350 British officers, had launched a simultaneous invasion from Nigeria to the west. The British struggled against strong resistance from a German force made up predominantly of local African soldiers, but with the help of the Royal Navy the capital Douala fell at the end of September and the German garrison was forced to seek refuge in the neutral territory of Spanish Guinea.

Only in German East Africa had the German
Schuztruppe
taken the initiative. There a large force of African Askaris, led by German officers, came under the command of the inspirational Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck. A veteran of the battle of the Waterberg, von Lettow-Vorbeck had witnessed the declaration of the Extermination Order at Osombo zoWindimbe, and in 1905 had been dispatched south to fight the Nama. By the end of 1914 von Lettow-Vorbeck had launched attacks against Belgian forces in the Congo and British positions in Kenya and Uganda, and had repelled a landing in East Africa by a large force of the British Indian Army at the battle of Tanga, the defining battle of a campaign that was to drag on until 1918.

In German South-West Africa, despite the dramatic landing at Lüderitz and the capture of Swakopmund, little was achieved in 1914. In stark contrast to the tactics of von Lettow-Vorbeck, Major Victor Franke, another veteran of the Herero and Nama wars and a recipient of the Pour le Mérite, made little attempt to confront the invading forces on the landing grounds. Enormously outnumbered, he had withdrawn his men inland, to positions behind the great shield of the Namib Desert. There they concentrated their efforts on maintaining control of the all-important railway hubs, in the south and centre of the colony, and defending the heartland of German settlement in the former Herero pasturelands around Windhoek. Before the Union army was able to launch an assault across the Namib to confront Franke’s
Schutztruppe
, General Louis Botha, the South African Prime Minister and commander of the Union forces in Swakopmund and Walvis Bay, was forced to return to Cape Town to deal with a rebellion among Boer soldiers.

With Botha out of the picture for several months, the South African expeditionary force in Swakopmund, Lüderitz and Walvis Bay were left with nothing to do but settle into their billets and wait. For the officers in the Union army’s logistics corps, the hold-up was an unalloyed blessing, allowing them and the thirty thousand black labourers they had brought with them to stockpile supplies and grapple with the enormous difficulties of fighting in the Namib Desert.

With so much time on their hands, some South African soldiers amused themselves by exploring the nearby deserts. In Swakopmund this led a handful of officers to stumble upon the last visible relic of the concentration camps that had been in operation in the town only six years earlier.

In February 1915 Eric Moore Ritchie, a lieutenant in Botha’s personal bodyguard, came across an enormous cemetery on the southern edge of Swakopmund. It was situated near the European graveyard, but stretched out into the desert. While the European graves were well tended and shaded by exotic trees, those in the desert were merely rough mounds of sand, a sign of hastily dug, shallow graves. They had been dug in neat rows but had neither headstones nor crosses. Writing later, Lieutenant Ritchie described being particularly struck by the size of Swakopmund’s cemetery. Not only was the desert graveyard several times the size of the European cemetery, it was hugely out of proportion to a town the size of Swakopmund.
2
Another South African soldier, the medical officer Dr Henry Walker, also happened upon the desert graveyard in early 1915. In
A Doctor’s
Diary in Damaraland
, Walker’s war memoirs, he recalled his confusion as to why so many bodies, presumably those of ‘natives’, lay interred on the fringes of such a small town:

The thousands of ‘little heaps of sand’ in Swakopmund’s desert graveyard, the last resting places of the thousands of Herero who had died in the town’s concentration camps, are still clearly visible today. Eroded by the wind and constantly shifting sands, they are less pronounced than they were in 1914, when Lieutenant Ritchie and Dr Walker encountered them, yet almost a century later the graveyard remains a shocking sight. Its scale is only truly apparent from the air, or on summer evenings when the low southern sun casts long shadows that pick out each individual grave. Swakopmund’s graveyard, like the history of Shark Island or the Extermination Order, is well known to locals, and yet for a century the graveyard has been the town’s unspoken secret. It is now sealed off from Swakopmund by a row of expensive modern villas, and many of the graves have been almost obliterated by the tyres of dune-buggies rented to tourists who used the graveyard as part of their desert race track. In 2007 a low wall was built to enclose the graves, and a plaque erected by Namibia’s Herero community marks the site.

Thirty years to the month after the Conference of Berlin had ratified Germany’s claim to South-West Africa, the South Africans finally started their advance across the Namib and Kalahari deserts. The South-West African campaign lasted just five months. As the main German settlements were captured one by one by the South Africans, the true horror of the fate that had befallen the Herero and Nama began to come to light. When South African units fighting in the north captured the fertile central plateau, they discovered a land largely depopulated and filled with horrific stories of recent events. In early May 1915, Dr Walker, the medic who had discovered the Swakopmund graveyard, arrived in the town of Otjimbingwe, in the wake of the fleeing
Schutztruppe
. Walker was struck by the profound fear that the German settlers felt at the prospect of life without the protection of their troops. ‘Here, as elsewhere,’ he noted, ‘the
German farmer and villager are living in constant dread of natives, both Hottentot and Herero; and if an evil conscience makes people afraid, they have every reason to be so.’ Walker, who was by now beginning to piece together the story of the Herero and Nama genocides, had come to understand why the German farmers feared retribution, and had grasped the relationship between the Swakopmund graveyard and the strikingly low numbers of Herero and Nama remaining in the colony. The German settlers of Otjimbingwe, Walker reported, are

On 5 May 1915, after marching uncontested into the town of Karibib, the South Africans uncovered the most shocking evidence of the recent genocides. Not far from Karibib, advancing South African units came across the stables and supply station at Okawayo. There they discovered the last survivors of the Shark Island concentration camp, still interned six years after the camp had been closed down.

In 1909 the
Etappenkommando
, the rear supply division of the
Schutztruppe
under the command of Major Ludwig Maercker, had reported that 240 Nama prisoners remained alive at Okawayo. Most of them were Witbooi or Bethanie Nama. The South Africans failed to record how many were still alive in 1915, but among the survivors was Samuel Izaak, the leader of the Witbooi Nama. A decade after he had surrendered to the Germans on his own terms, Izaak was finally released. The Nama from Okawayo were eventually returned to their former hometowns of Bethanie and Gibeon, where the few who remained subsisted as landless labourers on German farms built on their tribal lands. Samuel Izaak was fifty-nine years old and terminally ill when the South Africans arrived. He died in June before reaching his hometown, Gibeon. Okawayo was later
converted by the South Africans into an internment camp for captured
Schutztruppe
officers.