world » 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.