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Extermination — By Edict
Pre-Nazi Germany’s African genocide was a preview of the Holocaust.
Ullstein Bilderdienst, Berlin
This report is excerpted from an extensive investigation
by author and human rights writer Edwin Black. An
expanded version can be read online at bit.ly/24u1u9y.
The author’s website is www.edwinblack.com.
I
n recent years, too many in the African American com-
munity have expressed a disconnect to Holocaust topics,
seeing the genocide of Jews as someone else’s nightmare.
After all, African Americans are still struggling to achieve
general recognition of the barbarity of the Middle Passage,
the inhumanity of slavery, the oppression of Jim Crow and
the battle for modern civil rights.
For many in that community, the murder of 6 million Jews
and millions of other Europeans happened to other minori-
ties in a faraway place where they had no involvement.
However, a deeper look shows that
proto-Nazi ideology before the Third
Reich, the wide net of Nazi-era policy and
Hitler’s post-war legacy deeply impacted
Africans, Afro-Germans and African
Americans throughout the 20th century.
America’s black community has a
mighty stake in this topic. Understanding
the German Reich and the Holocaust is
Edwin Black important for blacks just as it is for other
Special to the communities, including Roma, Eastern
Jewish News Europeans, people with disabilities, the
gay community, Jehovah’s Witnesses and
many other groups in addition to Jews.
The dots are well known to many scholars — but rarely
connected to form a distinct historical nexus for either the
Holocaust or the African American communities.
This is understandable. The saga behind these connections
started decades before the Third Reich came into existence,
in a savage episode on another continent that targeted a
completely different racial and ethnic group for death and
destruction.
But the horrors visited on another defenseless group
endured and became a template for the Final Solution.
Students of the Holocaust are accustomed to looking back-
ward long before the Third Reich and long after the demise
of the Nazi war machine. African Americans should do the
same.
COLONIAL RACISM
It all begins with the oft-overlooked first genocide of the 20th
century. In the second half of the 1800s, Germany suffered
massive urban overcrowding due to its shift from an agrar-
ian society to an industrialized nation. As a result, Germany
sought lebensraum or “living space.” Africa, with its wide-
open areas and rugged, romantic beauty, had long beckoned
white Europe.
Beginning in 1884, Germany colonized four territories,
but its main coastal presence was in Southwest Africa, now
known as Namibia. There, German settlers were able to
establish lucrative plantations by exploiting the labor of local
Herero and Nama (also known as Hottentot) indigenous
peoples.
Berlin dispatched a small military contingent to protect
white settlers as they confronted the lightly armed African
natives considered untermenschen or “subhuman” in
50 May 26 • 2016
Surviving Herero tribesmen after escaping German executioners through the arid desert in German Southwest Africa
(circa 1907)
Germany’s twisted notion of racial hierarchy.
Once entrenched, the German minority established a cul-
ture of pure labor enslavement. Tribeswomen were subjected
to incessant and often capricious rape — and, not infre-
quently, their men were killed while attempting to defend
them. Whites routinely stole the possessions of natives, such
as cattle, and found ways to seize ancestral lands over triviali-
ties.
In 1903, on the verge of utter dispossession, Nama war-
riors revolted against the 2,500-strong white community.
Later, Herero fighters joined. Scores of German settlers were
massacred in a sequence of surprise attacks.
In 1904, Berlin dispatched 14,000 soldiers to suppress the
uprising. Lt. Gen. Lothar von Trotha, supreme commander
of German Southwest Africa, was determined to quickly and
completely exterminate the African natives, leaving the land
free for fulfillment of the German dream of lebensraum.
MASS MURDER
After decimating the outclassed fighters, Trotha decided
to annihilate the civilians as well. His proclamation to the
Hereros and the colonists was an open pledge of extermina-
tion, unmistakable to all:
“… Any Herero found inside the German frontier, with or
without a gun or cattle, will be executed. I shall spare neither
women nor children. I shall give the order to drive them away
and fire on them. Such are my words to the Herero people.”
Understandably, Trotha’s command became known in offi-
cial circles as a vernichtungsbefehl, that is, an “extermination
order.”
Many attempted to flee. But starved of food or water, the
desperate and weakened Herero wandered from watering
hole to watering hole. Many of these wells were poisoned by
the Germans or surrounded by deadly soldiers. Thousands,
in family groups, gradually fell dead, their rib cages bulging
to the limits of their gaunt and emaciated skins.
Many who did not die quickly enough were seized — still
whimpering — and then stacked by soldiers into human
heaps atop makeshift pyres comprised of bush branches and
limbs. The people mounds of vanquished Hereros, still barely
alive and breathing, were set on fire — to finish the business.
For many years, their mass murdered bodies littered the
desert in nightmarish aggregations of killed humanity.
CONCENTRATION CAMPS
With the vast majority of the Africans murdered, Berlin
rethought the extermination program. What good was
maintaining a colony without a local workforce to exploit?
Therefore, at some point, those civilian Herero and Nama
people and related clans that managed to escape the bullets,
cannon shot, killing thirst and fiery execution were rounded
up and sent to konzentrationslager or concentration camps.
Many died on the long march. Others were simply trans-
ported to serve in cruel bondage for great German industrial
concerns, building roads, berms and useful holes for the
German infrastructure. One of these camps was the notori-
ous Shark Island Concentration Camp.
For all intents and purposes, Shark Island was considered
an “extermination by labor” camp where Nama and Herero
civilians, including women and children, were knowingly
and methodically worked to death. Investigators estimate the
death rate at 90 percent.
Scholars commonly say the Armenian genocide of 1914-
1915, perpetrated by the Turks, was the first genocide of
the 20th century. That is wrong. History records the first
deliberate 20th-century effort to systematically exterminate
an entire group was by the Germans in Southwest Africa,
1904-1908.