Kaiser's Holocaust (40 page)

A week after the South Africans had reached Okawayo, General Botha’s troops marched into Windhoek and by the beginning of July, the bulk of Major Franke’s
Schutztruppe
had been forced into an area of scrub around Otavi and Tsumeb, two mining settlements in the north. After an indecisive encounter with South African units, Franke rather meekly surrendered. The next day, Governor Theodor Seitz, who just two years earlier had assured the crowds at the inauguration of the
Rider
Statue
that the Germans would be ‘the masters of this place, now and for ever’, issued an order of surrender.

On 21 October 1915 German South-West Africa became the British Protectorate of South-West Africa, and a week later the Union army general, E. Howard Gorges, was appointed its first administrator. With the
Schutztruppe
defeated, General Botha’s policy for the occupation of South-West Africa was to maintain ‘the standing of the white race’.
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The relationship between whites and the African majority was one of the many aspects of German colonial rule that remained almost untouched by the transfer of power from Berlin to Pretoria. Hence the sur render terms agreed between General Botha and Governor Sietz were unusually generous: German civilian administrators were permitted to remain in their posts, German schools were reopened, and men who had served as reservists were allowed to return to their homes and farms and carry on with their businesses. Only the
Schutztruppe
themselves were interned as prisoners of war.

The Herero and Nama who had survived the genocide revelled in the defeat of the Germans and had done everything in their power to assist the advance of the Union forces, but few believed that the South Africans would liberate them, restore their rights or return their homelands. The Herero, and even more so the
Nama, were well aware of the dire treatment of black Africans south of the Orange River. They did, however, hope that the end of German rule might usher in a more lenient administration in which they might regain a little of their cultural (if not economic) independence.

The South Africans, who just four years earlier had passed the Native Land Act, the foundation stone on which the Apartheid system was later to rest, had no interest in seeing the recent history of the colony reversed. There were those, however, in both Cape Town and London, who saw enormous benefits in having that history publicly exhumed.

In the aftermath of the German surrender, General Botha ordered the seizure and translation of all official German documents. Although the
Schutztruppe
had had the foresight to burn their own archives, the records of the central colonial administration in Windhoek and the files of several District Government Offices had been seized intact. As the South African garrison in Windhoek set up camp on the site of the former concentration camp, beneath the shadow of the
Rider Statue
, the mammoth task of translating three decades’ worth of documents began. Through this process, the first detailed history of the Herero and Nama genocides began to emerge.

Even before the South African victory, the British press had tried to rekindle memories of the ‘miserable war of extermination’ the Germans had fought against the Herero. The final German surrender inspired a new intensity in this propaganda campaign. On 10 July 1915
The Times
ran an article under the headline ‘German Frightfulness’ that reminded its readers that the war against the Herero had tarnished Germany as with ‘lasting disgrace’.
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The subtext behind these condemnations was the hope that evidence of ‘German Frightfulness’ might ultimately be used to prepare a case for the confiscation of South-West Africa, and
possibly all of Germany’s colonies. Just over a week after the article appeared in
The Times
, Andrew Bonar Law, the British Colonial Secretary, pompously declared in the House of Commons that ‘Nothing has done more to make the African natives appreciate the value of British rule than the experience they have had of German rule in Africa.’
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Of the eleven Members of Parliament who spoke in the Commons alongside Bonar Law in the July 1915 debate on the German colonies, seven openly advocated annexation; four had no practical suggestions on the matter. None were opposed.

It was not until America entered the war in the spring of 1917, and the prospect of a final victory over Germany re-emerged, that the British and South Africans felt able to focus their attention on the fate of her former colonial possessions. On 28 April 1917, just three weeks after President Woodrow Wilson issued his declaration of war, the British Imperial War Cabinet met to discuss the matter of the German colonies. The meeting brought together General Botha, Jan Smuts and John X. Merriman, who officially concluded that South Africa would do all in her power to ensure that South-West Africa was not returned to Germany in the following peace settlement.
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The cataloguing and publicising of the atrocities committed in the German colony would be, in Merriman’s phrase, the ‘strong point’ of a case for permanent confiscation. Compelling evidence of German colonial atrocities was needed, not only to condemn Germany, but to unify the Allies behind the Anglo-South Africa policy. Evidence of ‘German Frightfulness’, it was argued, might prove particularly valuable in convincing anti-imperialists in the American public that the confiscation of German colonies was not merely a pretext for the expansion of the British Empire.

British and South African condemnation of Germany’s treatment of the Herero and Nama in 1917 was belated and disingenuous. Britain’s own record of colonial and even genocidal violence laid her open to charges of hypocrisy. Moreover, during the Herero and Nama wars the British government had raised no
official objections to Germany’s treatment of her imperial subjects. Even when warned by their own military attaché, Colonel Trench, of the Germans’ intentions to exterminate the Nama on Shark Island, London had lodged no complaints.

Britain’s humanitarians had focused only a fraction of their energy on the crimes committed in South-West Africa under the Germans. They had reserved their most vocal denunciations for the Belgians and Portuguese, whom they regarded as the most cruel and inhumane of the colonial powers. The British press had similarly failed to fault German policy in South-West Africa. Throughout the Herero and Nama wars British newspapers had vacillated between their general enthusiasm for the great white colonial mission, and a barely disguised tone of condescension at the ineptitude and inexperience of the Germans. While they had dutifully reported the deaths of whites, they had often overlooked the killings and even massacres of Africans. When it had suited their purposes, they had lionised figures like Curt von François.

In the Cape Colony, the
Cape Argus
newspaper had repeatedly reported the German treatment of Herero and Nama prisoners in the concentration camps. Yet the Cape government had lodged no official complaints nor investigated claims that just across its border a system of concentration camps was in operation. On occasion, the South Africans had actively assisted the Germans. It was South African soldiers who finally captured and executed the Nama guerrilla leader Jacob Morenga, inside the Cape Colony in September 1907.

There can be little doubt that in September 1917, when the South Africans commissioned an official investigation into the treatment of the Herero and Nama under German rule, they were motivated primarily (perhaps exclusively) by self-interest and opportunism. Yet the investigation and the resulting report were characterised by a remarkable dedication to factual precision. Howard Gorges, John X. Merriman, Louis Botha and Jan Smuts were all astute enough to realise that their report needed to reflect recent events accurately, as any exaggerations
or fabrications would be easily discredited by the German government and press. But the South Africans, who by this time had processed and translated thousands of captured German documents, also understood that Germany’s crimes against the Herero and Nama had been so terrible that there was no need for exaggeration.

The officer commissioned to run the investigation was Major Thomas Leslie O’Reilly, of whom surprisingly little is known. He was a lawyer by profession, and an officer in the reserve of the Active Citizen Force. The records indicate he had joined General Botha’s army just before the push inland from Swakopmund in February 1915, but after the German surrender, he had returned to South Africa on a year-long leave of absence. In 1916 he came back to South-West Africa and was appointed magistrate of the town of Omaruru in western Hereroland. There he encountered a Herero community who were not only willing to recount the story of their recent persecution, but who lived, even in 1917, under the lash of the local farmers whose taste for casual violence continued long after the surrender of the
Schutztruppe
. Having served on the Special Criminal Court, O’Reilly had adjudicated in cases of maltreatment and even murder of Africans by their German and Boer employers. In September 1917, when O’Reilly received a telegram from Howard Gorges asking if he would be interested in drafting a report on German abuses, he replied, ‘I am as keen as mustard on it – I have been doing quite a lot of graft locally in that direction and even if they [Pretoria] change their minds, I intend going into the matter privately … It is quite enough to make one’s hair stiffen.’
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He was given just three months to carry out his research and produce an initial draft of the report. The completed draft would then be submitted to the Administrator’s Office in Windhoek and edited by Howard Gorges, before finally being published as a ‘Blue Book’, the term given to all British Parliamentary Reports. The foundation for much of O’Reilly’s work was the mountain of translated German documents that had been assembled in Windhoek. They included orders and letters drafted by
Curt von François, the very first ‘protection treaties’ bearing the signature of Heinrich Göring, and the papers of Theodor Leutwein, General von Trotha and Friedrich von Lindequist. In addition to the captured documents, O’Reilly punctuated his report with passages written by the former Commissioner for Settlement in South-West Africa, now political journalist, Dr Paul Rohrbach.

The completed report made dramatic use of photographic evidence. Photographs of the lynching and hangings of Herero men, originally taken by German settlers and soldiers as souvenirs of the war, were collected as evidence. Many of the most horrific were reproduced in a special appendix to the Blue Book. Even the implements of what had been called ‘paternal chastisement’ – the beatings and corporal punishment meted out to the Africans – were catalogued and photographed. Leg irons, manacles, handcuffs and whips were all carefully numbered and annotations added, listing their various purposes and the intensity of physical pain each device was capable of inducing.

The aspect of O’Reilly’s work that makes the Blue Book an almost unique document was the gathering of sworn statements. After the German surrender in 1915, hundreds of Herero and Nama had returned from exile in the Owambo Kingdoms, Angola and Bechuanaland. This allowed O’Reilly the opportunity to locate survivors whose collective experience covered every aspect of German rule. His interviewees included Herero who had been pushed into the Omaheke after the battle of the Waterberg and people who had evaded the Cleansing Patrols, as well as prisoners from the concentration camps. He also spoke to members of the Nama tribes who, as former allies of the
Schutztruppe
, had witnessed the atrocities they had committed against the Herero at the Waterberg and its aftermath. Other Nama were able to give accounts of their own persecution following Hendrik Witbooi’s failed rebellion. The first of these interviews was conducted among members of the Herero community at Omaruru, where O’Reilly was based and well respected.

The way the Blue Book deployed the testimony of living
witnesses and the rigour with which O’Reilly appropriated the German documents foreshadowed the preparations for the case for the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials thirty years later. In the history of colonialism in Africa, however, the Blue Book stands almost entirely alone as a reliable and comprehensive exploration of the disinheritance and destruction of indigenous peoples.