Kaiser's Holocaust (41 page)

While America’s entry into the war in 1917 had emboldened the British and South Africans to prepare their case against German colonialism in Africa, equally seismic events on the Eastern Front persuaded the German High Command that it was they who would win and they who would dictate the peace terms. With both Germany and the Western Allies committed to their own contradictory visions of the future, diplomats in Berlin, London and Pretoria spent the last few months of the war redrafting the borders, and parcelling out the land and peoples of their own imagined Africas. While Major O’Reilly’s Blue Book was being edited by Howard Gorges and debated by the leaders of Britain and South Africa, thousands of miles away in the offices of the German Colonial Department, far more radical plans for the long-term exploitation of Germany’s African empire were being readied and refined.

The shift in Germany’s fortunes that convinced millions of her citizens and soldiers that victory would finally be theirs began in the summer of 1917. When Russia’s last great offensive collapsed, the Bolsheviks took power in St Petersburg. Lenin called for the socialisation of the country and an armistice with Germany. Russia’s peasant soldiers responded by abandoning the trenches and literally walking home. Under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Russia lost over a quarter of her population, almost 90 percent of her coal reserves and a third of her agricultural output. The Germans and their allies became the overlords of an area three times the size of the Reich itself.

The Western Allies were stunned by the terms of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Both the French and British governments looked on in horror at the strength Germany could draw from
the enormous empire she had forged in the East. An official at the British Foreign Office feared the conquered territories might revive Germany, mollify the effects of the naval blockade and allow her ‘to fight the world for ever and be unconquerable’.

To the German High Command, the immediate significance of Brest-Litovsk and the defeat of the Russians was that it tipped the scales of military power dramatically in Germany’s favour. In order to secure her position as master of the East and force the Allies to return her colonies, the generals committed themselves to one final offensive that would defeat the French and British before the United States was able to bring her almost limitless military and industrial might into play on the Western Front.

Over the winter of 1917–18, the German divisions released from the Eastern Front – fifty in total – were ferried across Germany with thousands of artillery pieces, machine-guns and all the paraphernalia of industrial warfare. Like an enormous blood transfusion, the eastern divisions revived the army on the Western Front. The great Spring Offensive of 1918 was launched in the early hours of 21 March. The bombardment that heralded the attack was the most destructive in history, greater even than the titanic artillery duels fought between the armies of Hitler and Stalin a quarter of a century later. A million shells were assembled for a bombardment lasting just five hours. Whole British and French battalions were obliterated. Men were atomised in a maelstrom of shells, others spluttered to their deaths in clouds of lachrymatory, chlorine and phosgene gas. In the wake of the bombardment, through the smoke, gas and early morning spring fog, came the gas-masked storm troopers, the spearhead of a German force seventy-six divisions strong. On a front 50 miles wide they pushed the British Fifth Army aside and by the end of the first day they had burst through into open country.

The speed with which the storm troopers raced through the British lines, towards the old battlefield of the Somme, was rivalled only by the pace at which the German High Command and civilian leadership embraced the prospect of imminent victory. Buoyed up on a wave of jubilation, the Kaiser awarded
the children of Germany a ‘Victory Day’ holiday and informed his entourage that should ‘a British parliamentarian come to sue for peace, he must kneel before the imperial standard, for this is a victory of monarchy over democracy’.
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In March and April 1918, a German scheme for the annexation of territory in Africa, originally drafted in the first weeks of the war, was revived. In August 1914, the Foreign Secretary, Gottlieb von Jagow, had invited Wilhelm Solf, Secretary of the Colonial Department, to draft formal proposals for the expansion of Germany’s empire in Africa. Solf, the former Governor of German Samoa and successor to Friedrich von Lindequist at the Colonial Department, duly submitted a memorandum complete with annotated maps. He proposed an adapted version of an old plan put forward at various times by colonialist movements and advocates for the creation of
Mittelafrika
– an enormous ‘German Central African Empire’ spanning the entire width of the continent, linking Germany’s four pre-war colonies. At its centre was the Congo, a region that Belgium would be forced to surrender. The Congo was to be linked to German South-West Africa by the annexation of the Portuguese colony of Angola. While Portugal and Belgium were to be entirely ejected from the continent, the British and French would be permitted some minor role in the post-war exploitation of Africa, a continent that Germany was to dominate.

By 1918 the only land on the African continent still occupied by Germany was that under the feet of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and his ragtag army of Askaris. Yet the loss of her colonies had done little to dim calls for the establishment of
Mittelafrika
. Throughout the war, the colonial societies, the Pan-Germans and a host of other right-wing nationalist movements and intellectuals had maintained a constant clamour for colonial expansion in Africa. Six days after the launch of the Spring Offensive, Wilhelm Solf received a letter from a German industrialist that perfectly captures how the mirage of impending victory on the Western Front breathed new life into even the most radical of Germany’s colonial war aims:

Solf became swept up by events, instructing officials in the Colonial Department to determine, in discussion with their colleagues in the Naval Office, where Germany might site naval bases and coaling stations to defend
Mittelafrika
. For advice they turned to representatives of the Woermann Shipping Line, whose predecessors had advised Bismarck which stretches of the African coastline might be claimed as German protectorates back in 1884. Together the navy, civilian government and private business speculated, as if composing a shopping list, over the suitability of the continent’s various anchorages. While Solf favoured the annexation of the British port of Bathurst in the Gambia, the more military-minded thought Dakar in French Senegal would be easier to defend.

German colonial ambitions in the last months of the war were not limited to Africa. In 1915 those whose paramount concern was the annexation of enemy territory had turned their gaze away from Africa and towards the one arena of the war in which the army had been capable of making spectacular advances. In the same months that the
Schutztruppe
of Major Franke had retreated across the Namib Desert, the German armies on the Eastern Front, under the dual command of Generals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, had battled their way across the expanses of western Russia in one of the most successful offensives of the whole war.

The ‘Great Advance’ of 1915 had driven the Russian frontline back by 250 miles and captured Congress Poland, the Baltic and
much of European Russia, an area about equal in size and scope to that seized by the Nazis in 1941. This dramatic success allowed Germany to take control of the region’s industrial resources and redirect her harvests towards Berlin and away from Moscow. It also presented her with an opportunity to realise a colonial fantasy of living space in the East that had existed side by side with her colonial aspirations in Africa since the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Over the course of the occupation, parts of the European East came to be seen by the occupiers as a
terra nullius
, an empty space under-cultivated and under-utilised by a people who had neither the technology nor the drive to shape the land to their will. One soldier described the East as ‘a colonial land, which lies unexplored before its owner’.
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Some in the army and among the nationalist right suggested that Germany had a ‘mission in the East’ to reshape the landscape, and to uplift the Slavic and Jewish peoples of the region by exposing them to the benefits of German
Kultur
and the fruits of German industry.

By 1917, new possibilities in the East had emerged. German officers, like the
Schutztruppe
of South-West Africa, began to imagine that they might never leave. They dreamed of land and farms, of possibilities as limitless as the landscape itself. General von Ludendorff spoke of the East as space in which the veterans of his army might become soldier-farmers, pioneers on the eastern fringes of German
Kultur
. Following an advance in the Crimea in 1917, Ludendorff began to discuss the possibility of creating permanent colonies for ethnic Germans there. The man tasked with devising the initial plans for the establishment of large-scale German colonies in the Ukraine was Friedrich von Lindequist, now retired from the Colonial Department.
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German settlement in Eastern Europe was imagined as a task that would follow Germany’s final victory. However, the short-term needs of ‘total war’ – and the German army’s propensity for bureaucratic cruelty and inhumane treatment – contradicted the nation’s long-term and more paternal aspirations. The forced-labour regimes they instituted were brutal and poorly managed.
The army introduced a ludicrous number of rules and regulations. Punishments for even minor infractions were excessive, exemplary and often collective. Most damaging of all, the requisitioning of food left whole communities malnourished.

Yet for all its brutality, the German occupation of Eastern Europe during World War I is striking in how little it resembles German military policy in South-West Africa or Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe in the 1940s. The
Ostjuden
, the Eastern Jews who were the main translators for Ludendorff’s army, were the same communities who were systematically murdered in their villages and town squares by the Nazi
Einzatzgruppen
twenty-six years later. Between 1915 and 1918, there was talk among the Germans in the East of settlement and colonisation but not of ‘dying races’ or concentration camps.

The euphoria that followed the initial successes of the 1918 Spring Offensive lingered far longer in Berlin and Potsdam than at the front. Just two weeks after the initial assault, the offensive had ground to a halt. A second attack, Operation George, was launched to maintain forward momentum. This too failed. The most famous casualty of Operation George was Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, whose death opened the way for the young Hermann Göring to succeed him as leader of the famous ‘Flying Circus’ Squadron. A third offensive took the German army back to the River Marne where they had their first bruising encounter with the Americans, 318,000 of whom were now available for action. A million more were in training or crossing the Atlantic. A fourth attack pushed the Germans further towards Paris, a fifth took them across the Marne itself, and brought the French capital within the range of a special long-range Howitzer that crashed shells down on the terrified populace. But on the night of 18 July the Germans were halted and the tide of the war turned decisively and permanently against them. Within a month Bulgaria, Turkey and Austria-Hungary, one by one, fell out of the war.