Herero and Namaqua Genocide



The Herero and Namaqua Genocide is considered the first genocide of the 20th century. It occurred from 1904 until 1907 in German South-West Africa (modern day Namibia), during the scramble for Africa.

On January 12, 1904, the Herero people, led by Samuel Maharero, rebelled against German colonial rule. In August, German general Lothar von Trotha defeated the Herero in the Battle of Waterberg and drove them into the desert of Omaheke, where most of them died of thirst. In October, the Nama people also rebelled against the Germans only to suffer a similar fate.

In total, between 24,000 up to 100,000 Herero perished along with 10,000 Nama. The genocide was characterized by widespread death by starvation and thirst by preventing the fled Herero from returning from the Namib Desert. Some sources also claim the German colonial army to have systematically poisoned desert wells.

In 1985, the United Nations' Whitaker Report classified the aftermath as an attempt to exterminate the Herero and Nama peoples of South-West Africa, and therefore one of the earliest attempts of genocide in the 20th century. The German government recognized and apologized for the events in 2004.

Background
The Herero were originally a tribe of cattle herders living in a region of German South West Africa, presently modern Namibia. The area occupied by the Herero was known as Damaraland.

In 1883, during the scramble for Africa, Franz Adolf Eduard Lüderitz purchased land from the Nama and, in August 1884, after some discussion with the British Imperial government, it was declared a German protectorate; at that time, it was the only overseas German territory deemed suitable for white settlement. From the outset the Germans protectorate was involved in local fighting. Chief of the neighbouring Hereros, Kamaherero Maherero had made himself great by uniting all the Herero. He signed a treaty of protection with German protectorate against Khoikhoi in 1885 giving the Germans more land. This treaty was renounced in 1888 due to lack of German support against the Khoikhoi but it was reaffirmed in 1890. In 1890 Kamaherero's son Samuel signed a great deal more land over to the Germans in return for helping him to establish him as paramount chief. German involvement in tribal fighting ended in tenuous peace in 1894. In that year, Theodor Leutwein became governor of the territory, which underwent a period of rapid development, while the German government sent the Schutztruppe, imperial colonial troops, to pacify the region.

Under German colonial rule natives were routinely used as slave labourers, and their lands were frequently confiscated and given to colonists, who were encouraged to settle on land taken from the natives, causing a great deal of resentment.

The only land seized and handed over to settlers and colonial companies, followed the Herero revolt. At this time restricted reservations were established for Africans. Eventually the area was to be inhabited predominantly by whites and become "African Germany" Over the next decade, the land and the cattle that were essential to Herero and Nama lifestyles passed into the hands of German settlers arriving in South-West Africa.

Revolts
In 1903, some of the Nama tribes rose in revolt under the leadership of Hendrik Witbooi. A number of factors led the Herero to join them in January 1904.

Unsurprisingly, one of the major issues was land rights. The Herero had already ceded over a quarter of their 130000 km2 to German colonists by 1903, prior to the completion of the Otavi railroad line running from the African coast to inland German settlements. Completion of this line would have rendered the German colonies much more accessible and would have ushered a new wave of Europeans into the area. Marxist historian Drechsler states that there was discussion of the possibility of establishing and placing the Herero in native reserves and that this was further proof of the German colonists' sense of ownership over the land. Drechsler goes on to claim that in illustration of the gap between the rights of a European and an African, the German Colonial League held that, in regards to legal matters, the testimony of seven Africans was equivalent to that of one white man. Bridgman claims racial tensions underlying these developments; the average German colonist viewed native Africans as a lowly source of cheap labour, and others welcomed their extermination.

Mark R. Lipschutz and R. Kent Rasmussen however simply argue that having ceded so much land to the Germans in return for supporting his authority over the other Herero, Samuel Maherero found that they could not do so for him so that he started to loose control over the chiefs and he needed to seize that land back again to remain in control. Therefore when in 1903 the Governor Leutwin was away fighting the Bondelwarts Nama in the south Maherero launched his attack and seized the land.

A new policy on debt collection, enforced in November 1903, also played a role in the uprising. For many years, the Herero population had fallen in the habit of borrowing money from white traders at great interest. For a long time, much of this debt went uncollected and accumulated, as most Hereros had no means to pay. To correct this growing problem, Governor Leutwein decreed with good intentions that all debts not paid within the next year would be voided. In the absence of hard cash, traders would often seize cattle, or whatever objects of value they could get their hands on, in order to recoup their loans as quickly as possible. This fostered a feeling of resentment towards the Germans on the part of the Herero people, which escalated to hopelessness when they saw that German officials were sympathetic to the traders who were about to loose what they were owed.

The Herero judged the situation intolerable and revolted in early 1904. The timing of their attack was ideal. After successfully asking a large Herero tribe to surrender their weapons, Governor Leutwein was convinced that they and the rest of the native population were essentially pacified and half the German troops stationed in his colony had been withdrawn. Led by Chief Samuel Maharero, they surrounded Okahandja and cut links to Windhoek, the colonial capital. Maharero issued a manifesto in which he forbid his troops the killing of Englishmen, Boers, uninvolved tribes as well as women and children in general.

Leutwein was forced to request reinforcements and an experienced officer from the German government in Berlin. Lieutenant-General Lothar von Trotha was appointed Supreme Commander (Oberbefehlshaber) of South-West Africa on 3 May, arriving with an expeditionary force of 14,000 troops on 11 June.

Leutwein was subordinate to the Colonial Department of the Prussian Foreign Office, which reported to Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow while general Trotha reported to the military German General Staff, which was only subordinate to Emperor Wilhelm II.

Leutwein wanted to defeat the most determined Herero rebels and negotiate a surrender with the remainder to achieve a political settlement. Trotha, however, planned to crush the native resistance through military force. He stated that: "My intimate knowledge of many central African tribes (Bantu and others) has everywhere convinced me of the necessity that the Negro does not respect treaties but only brute force"

Genocide
General Trotha openly stated his proposed solution to end the resistance of the Herero people in a letter, before the Battle of Waterberg: "I believe that the nation as such should be annihilated, or, if this was not possible by tactical measures, have to be expelled from the country...This will be possible if the water-holes from Grootfontein to Gobabis are occupied. The constant movement of our troops will enable us to find the small groups of nation who have moved backwards and destroy them gradually." Trotha's troops defeated 3,000–5,000 Herero combatants at the Battle of Waterberg on 11–12 August 1904 but were unable to encircle and eliminate the retreating survivors. The pursuing German forces prevented groups of Herero to break from the main body of the fleeing force and pushed them further into the desert and as exhausted Herero fell to the ground unable to go on, German soldiers acting on orders killed men, women and children. Jan Cloete, acting as a guide for the Germans, witnessed the atrocities committed by the German troops and deposed the following statement: "I was present when the Herero were defeated in a battle in the vicinity of Waterberg. After the battle all men, women, and children who fell into German hands, wounded or otherwise, were mercilessly put to death. Then the Germans set off in pursuit of the rest, and all those found by the wayside and in the sandveld were shot down and bayoneted to death. The mass of the Herero men were unarmed and thus unable to offer resistance. They were just trying to get away with their cattle."

A portion of the Herero escaped the Germans and went to Omaheke Desert, hoping to reach British territory of Bechuanaland; less than 1,000 managed to reach the British protectorate where they were granted asylum. In order to prevent them from returning Trotha ordered the desert to be sealed off. German patrols later found skeletons around holes 40 feet deep that were dug up in a vain attempt to find water. Maherero and between 500 to 1,500 men crossed the Kalahari into Bechuanaland where he was accepted as a vassal of the batswana chief Sekgoma. On 2 October, Trotha issued a warning to the Hereros: I, the great general of the German soldiers, send this letter to the Hereros. The Hereros are German subjects no longer. They have killed, stolen, cut off the ears and other parts of the body of wounded soldiers, and now are too cowardly to want to fight any longer. I announce to the people that whoever hands me one of the chiefs shall receive 1,000 marks, and 5,000 marks for Samuel Maherero. The Herero nation must now leave the country. If it refuses, I shall compel it to do so with the 'long tube' (cannon). 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.

He further gave orders that:

This proclamation is to read to the troops at roll-call, with the addition that the unite that catches a captain will also receive the appropriate reward, and that the shooting at women and children is to be understood as shooting above their heads, so as to force them to run [away]. I assume absolutely that this proclamation will result in taking no more male prisoners, but will not degenerate into atrocities against women and children. The latter will run away if one shoots at them a couple of times. The troops will remain conscious of the good reputation of the German soldier.

Trotha gave orders that captured Herero males were to be executed, while women and children were to be driven into the desert where their death from starvation and thirst was to be certain; Trotha argued that there was no need to make exceptions for Herero women and children, since these would "infect German troops with their diseases", the insurrection Trotha explained "is and remains the beginning of a racial struggle". German soldiers regularly raped young Herero women before killing them or letting them die in the desert After the war, von Trotha argued that his orders were necessary writing in 1909 that "If I had made the small water holes accessible to the womenfolk, I would run the risk of an African catastrophe comparable to the Battle of Beresonia"

The German general staff was aware of the atrocities that were taking place; its official publication, named Der Kampf, noted that: This bold enterprise shows up in the most brilliant light the ruthless energy of the German command in pursuing their beaten enemy. No pains, no sacrifices were spared in eliminating the last remnants of enemy resistance. Like a wounded beast the enemy was tracked down from one water-hole to the next, until finally he became the victim of his own environment. The arid Omaheke [desert] was to complete what the German army had begun: the extermination of the Herero nation.

Alfred von Schlieffen who served as Chief of the Imperial German General Staff approved of von Trotha's intentions in terms of a "racial struggle" and the need to "wipe out the entire nation or to drive them out of the country", but had doubts about his strategy, preferring their surrender.

Governor Leutwein, later relieved of his duties, complained to Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow about Trotha's actions, seeing the general's orders as intruding upon the civilian colonial jurisdiction and ruining any chance of a political settlement. According to Professor Mahmood Mamdani from Columbia University, opposition to the policy of annihilation was largely the consequence of the fact that colonial officials looked at the Herero people as potential source of labor, thus economically important. For instance, Governor Leutwien wrote that: "I do not concur with those fanatics who want to see the Herero destroyed altogether...I would consider such a move a grave mistake from an economic point of view. We need the Herero as cattle breeders...and especially as labourers. Having no authority over the military, Chancellor Bülow could only advise Wilhelm II that Trotha's actions were "contrary to Christian and humanitarian principle, economically devastating and damaging to Germany's international reputation."

After a political battle in Berlin between the civilian government and the military, Wilhelm II countermanded Trotha's decree of 2 October on 8 December, but the massacres had already begun. Upon the arrival of the new orders at the end of 1904, prisoners were herded into concentration camps and given by the German state to private companies as slave labourers, and it has even been claimed exploited as human guinea pigs in medical experiments

Many Herero died later of disease, overwork and malnutrition

Concentration camps
Survivors, mostly women and children, were eventually put in concentration camps, such as that at Shark Island, similar to those used in British South Africa during the Second Boer War. The German authorities gave each Herero a number and meticulously recorded every death, whether in the camps or from forced labor. German enterprises have been said to have been able to rent Hereros in order to use their manpower, and workers' deaths were permitted and even reported to the German authorities. Malnutrition, disease and forced labour killed an estimated 50–80% of the entire Herero population by 1908, when the camps were closed.

The mortality rate in the camps in 1908 reached 45%

The prisoners were fenced in, either by thorn-bush fences or by barbed wire, and people were typically crammed into small areas. The Windhoek camp held about 5000 prisoners of war in 1906. Food rations were minimal, consisting of a daily allowance of a handful of uncooked rice, some salt and water. As the prisoners lacked pots the rice they received was uncooked and indigestible; horses and oxes that died in the camp were later distributed to the inmates as food. As a result dysentery spread, in addition to lung diseases, despite those conditions the Herero ware taken outside the camp every day for labour under harsh treatment by the German guards, while the sick were left without any medical assistance or nursing care. A lethal combination of a high concentration of people in a small confined area, lack of medical attention, poor unhygienic living quarters, and lack of protective clothing contributed to the spread of diseases, such as typhoid, which spread rapidly.

Beatings and abuse were common, and the sjambok was often used to beat prisoners who were forced to work; a September 28, 1905, article in the South African newspaper Cape Argus detailed some of the abuse, with the heading: "In German S. W. Africa: Further Startling Allegations: Horrible Cruelty". In an interview with Percival Griffith, "an accountant of profession, who owing to hard times, took up on transport work at Angra Pequena, Lüderitz", related his experiences. "There are hundreds of them, mostly women and children and a few old men ... when they fall they are sjamboked by the soldiers in charge of the gang, with full force, until they get up ... On one occasion I saw a woman carrying a child of under a year old slung at her back, and with a heavy sack of grain on her head ... she fell. The corporal sjamboked her for certainly more than four minutes and sjamboked the baby as well ... the woman struggled slowly to her feet, and went on with her load. She did not utter a sound the whole time, but the baby cried very hard." During the war, a number of people from the Cape (in modern day South Africa) sought employment as transport riders for German troops in Namibia. Upon their return to the Cape, some of these people recounted their stories, including those of the imprisonment and genocide of the Herero and Namaqua people. Fred Cornell, a British aspirant diamond prospector, was in Lüderitz when the Shark Island camp was being used. Cornell wrote of the camp: "Cold - for the nights are often bitterly cold there - hunger, thirst, exposure, disease and madness claimed scores of victims every day, and cartloads of their bodies were every day carted over to the back beach, buried in a few inches of sand at low tide, and as the tide came in the bodies went out, food for the sharks." The concentration camp on Shark Island, in the coastal town of Lüderitz, was the worst of the five Namibian camps. Lüderitz lies in southern Namibia, flanked by desert and ocean. In the harbour lies Shark Island, which then was connected to the mainland only by a small causeway. The island is now, as it was then, barren and characterised by solid rock carved into surreal formations by the hard ocean winds. The camp was placed on the far end of the relatively small island, where the prisoners would have suffered complete exposure to the strong winds that sweep Lüderitz for most of the year. The first prisoners to arrive were, according to a missionary called Kuhlman, 487 Herero ordered to work on the railway between Lüderitz and Kubub. In October 1905, Kuhlman reported the appalling conditions and high death rate among the Herero on the island. Throughout 1906, the island had a steady inflow of prisoners, with 1,790 Nama prisoners arriving on September 9 alone. In the annual report for Lüderitz in 1906, an unidentified clerk remarked that "the Angel of Death" had come to Shark Island. German Commander Von Estorff wrote in a report that approximately 1,700 prisoners had died by April 1907, 1,203 of them Nama. In December 1906, four months after their arrival, 291 Nama died (a rate of more than nine people a day). Missionary reports put the death rate at between 12 and 18 a day; as many as 80% of the prisoners sent to the Shark Island concentration camp never left the island.

There are accusations of Herero women having agreed to sex slavery as a means of survival. Dutch historian Jan-Bart Gewald of the University of Cologne has written that the Germans set up special camps for their troops and that many children were born of German fathers and Herero mothers. Trotha was opposed to contact between natives and settlers, believing that the insurrection was "the beginning of a racial struggle" and fearing that the colonists would be infected by native diseases.

Medical experiments
German scientist Eugen Fischer came to the concentration camps to conduct medical experiments on race, using children of Herero people and mulatto children of Herero women and German men as test subjects. Together with Theodor Mollison he also experimented upon Herero prisoners Those experiments included sterilization, injection of smallpox, typhus as well as tuberculosis The numerous cases of mixed offspring upset the German colonial administration and the obsession with racial purity. Eugen Fischer studied 310 mixed-race children, calling them "Rehoboth bastards"of "lesser racial quality". Fischer also subjected them to numerous racial tests such as head and body measurements, eye and hair examinations. In conclusion of his studies he advocated genocide of alleged "inferior races" claiming that "whoever thinks thoroughly the notion of race, can not arrive at a different conclusion".

Fischer's (at the time considered) scientific actions and torment of the children were part of wider history of abusing Africans for experiments, and echoed earlier actions by German anthropologists who stole skeletons and bodies from African graveyards and took them to Europe for research or sale.

Fischer later became chancellor of the University of Berlin, where he taught medicine to Nazi physicians. One of his prominent students was Josef Mengele, the doctor who made genetic experiments on Jewish children at Auschwitz.

According to Clarence Lusane, an Associate Professor of Political Science at American University School of International Service, Fischer's experiments can be seen as testing ground for later medical procedures used during Nazi Holocaust.

The Herero genocide has commanded the attention of historians who study complex issues of continuity between this event and the Nazi Holocaust, with some having argued that the Herero genocide set a precedent in Imperial Germany to be later followed by Nazi Germany's establishment of death camps, such as the one at Auschwitz.

Mahmood Mamdani writes that the links between the Holocaust and the Herero Genocide are beyond the execution of an annihilation policy and the establishment of concentration camps. Focusing on a statement written by General Trotha: I destroy the African tribes with streams of blood... Only following this cleansing can something new emerge, which will remain. Mamdani takes note of the similarity between the aims and desires of the General and the Nazis. In both cases there was a Social Darwinist notion of "cleansing" after which "something new" would "emerge".

Later Nazi use of "Lebensraum" and "Konzentrationslager" (concentration camp) suggests an important question: did Wilhelmine colonization and genocide in Namibia influence Nazi plans to conquer and settle Eastern Europe, enslave and murder millions of Slavs, and exterminate Gypsies and Jews?

The German experience in Namibia was a crucial precursor to Nazi colonialism and genocide and that personal connections, literature, and public debates served as conduits for communicating colonialist and genocidal ideas and methods from the colony to Germany.

Number of victims
The German colonial authorities never conducted a census before 1904. A census performed in 1905 revealed that 25,000 Herero remained in German South-West Africa.

According to the 1985 United Nations' Whitaker Report, the population of 80,000 Herero was reduced to 15,000 "starving refugees" between 1904 and 1907 In Colonial Genocide and Reparations Claims in the 21st Century: The Socio-Legal Context of Claims under International Law by the Herero against Germany for Genocide in Namibia by Jeremy Sarkin-Hughes a number of 100,000 victims is given. German author Walter Nuhn states that in 1904 only 40,000 Herero lived in German South-West Africa, and therefore "only 24,000" could have been killed.

Aftermath
With the closure of concentration camps all surviving Herero were distributed as labourers for settlers in the German colony, and from that time on, all Herero's over the age of seven were forced to wear a metal disc with the their labour registration number.

It took the German colonial government until 1908 to fully re-establish its authority over the territory. About 19,000 German troops were engaged in conflict, of which 3,000 saw combat, the rest were used for upkeep and administration; the German losses were 676 soldiers killed in fighting, 76 missing and 689 dead from disease. The costs of the campaign were 600 million marks, the normal subsidy of the colony was usually 14.5 million marks At about the same time, diamonds were discovered in the territory, and this did much to boost its prosperity. However, it was short-lived. In 1915, at the start of World War I, the German colony was taken over and occupied in the South-West Africa Campaign by the Union of South Africa, acting on behalf of the British Imperial Government. South Africa received a League of Nations Mandate over South-West Africa in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles.

Recognition
In 1985, the United Nations' Whitaker Report classified the aftermath as an attempt to exterminate the Herero and Nama peoples of South-West Africa, and therefore one of the earliest attempts of genocide in the 20th century.

In 1998, German President Roman Herzog visited Namibia and met Herero leaders. Chief Munjuku Nguvauva demanded a public apology and compensation. Herzog expressed regret but stopped short of an apology. He also pointed out that special reparations were out of the question.

The Hereros filed a lawsuit in the United States in 2001 demanding reparations from the German government and the Deutsche Bank, which financed the German government and companies in Southern Africa.

On August 16, 2004, at the 100th anniversary of the start of the genocide, a member of the German government, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, Germany's Minister for Economic Development and Cooperation, officially apologized and expressed grief about the genocide, declaring amidst a speech that:

We Germans accept our historical and moral responsibility and the guilt incurred by Germans at that time. She ruled out paying special compensations, but promised continued economic aid for Namibia which currently amounts to $14m a year.

The von Trotha family travelled to Omaruru in October 2007 by invitation of the royal Herero chiefs and publicly apologized for the actions of their relative. Wolf-Thilo von Trotha said: We, the von Trotha family, are deeply ashamed of the terrible events that took place 100 years ago. Human rights were grossly abused that time."

Peter Katjavivi, a former Namibian ambassador to Germany, demanded in August 2008 that the skulls of Herero and Nama prisoners of the 1904-08 uprising, which were taken to Germany for scientific research to "prove" the superiority of white Europeans over Africans, be returned to Namibia. Katjavivi was reacting to a German television documentary which reported that its investigators had found over 40 of these skulls at two German universities, among them probably the skull of a Nama chief who had died on Shark Island near Luederitz.

Media
A BBC Documentary explores the Herero/Nama genocide and the circumstances surrounding it.

A short documentary in production, From Herero To Hitler: Planting the Seeds of a Future Genocide, will examine how events in German South-West Africa relate to the actions of Nazi Germany.

Fictional representations
One chapter of Thomas Pynchon's novel V. (1963) is about the Herero genocide. A group of characters of Herero descent are also present in his Gravity's Rainbow (1974), which hints more than once at the Herero massacre.

German Denial and Revisionism
Nevertheless details of von Trotha's handling of the war, of the aftermath of the Battle of Waterberg and of the concentration camps are not universally accepted and neither is the claim that a genocide was planned or in some cases even took place. Brigitte Lau in particular has pointed to Marxist bias by DDR historian Horst Drechsler (Let us Die Fighting, London, 1988 translation) and claimed important factual errors, pointing amongst other things to his and other's reliance on a First World War British propaganda.

Even Werner Hillebrecht who as recently as 2007 criticises Brigitte Lau's work at great length argues that there was no plotting to commit genocide, that even von Trotha "initially planned to take prisoners", but rather that when the logistical impossibility of dealing with tens of thousands of prisoners became apparent he let the desert deal with the problem. He says the German command is guilty of genocide because "They let it happen".

Some studies have considered what motivation Germany could have to plan and instigate genocide of the Herero. It has been noted that although German colonists did seize and exploit much Herero/Nama soil, diamonds can not have been a motive as reports of their discovery do not begin until 1908.

Bibliography and documentaries

 * Rachel Anderson, Redressing Colonial Genocide Under International Law: The Hereros' Cause of Action Against Germany, 93 California Law Review 1155 (2005).
 * Exterminate all the Brutes, Sven Lindqvist, London, 1996.
 * "A Forgotten History-Concentration Camps were used by Germans in South West Africa", Casper W. Erichsen, in the Mail and Guardian, Johannesburg, 17 August 2001.
 * Genocide & The Second Reich, BBC Four, David Olusoga, October 2004
 * German Federal Archives, Imperial Colonial Office, Vol. 2089, 7 (recto)
 * "The Herero and Nama Genocides, 1904-1908", J.B. Gewald, in Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, New York, Macmillan Reference, 2004.
 * Herero Heroes: A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia 1890 - 1923, J.B. Gewald, Oxford, Cape Town, Athens, OH, 1999.
 * Let Us Die Fighting: the Struggle of the Herero and Nama against German Imperialism, 1884-1915, Horst Drechsler, London, 1980.
 * "The Revolt of the Hereros", Jon M. Bridgman, Perspectives on Southern Africa, Berkeley, University of California, 1981.
 * A probable source for much of this information is Isabell Hull's Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 2005). Parts of this entry are nearly word-for-word summaries of Hull's analysis.
 * Hull, Isabell (2005) "The Military Campaign in German Southwest Africa, 1904-1907. Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Issue 37, pp. 39-49.
 * Zimmerer, Jürgen (2005) "Annihilation in Africa: The 'Race War' in German Southwest Africa (1904-1908) and its Significance for a Global History of Genocide." Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Issue 37, pp. 51–57.
 * Absolute Destruction: Military Culture And the Practices of War in Imperial Germany by Isabel V. Hull Cornell University Press 2006
 * Mohamed Adhikari, "'Streams Of Blood And Streams Of Money': New Perspectives on the Annihilation of the Herero and Nama Peoples Of Namibia, 1904-1908," Kronos: Journal Of Cape History 2008 34: 303-320
 * Mohamed Adhikari, "'Streams Of Blood And Streams Of Money': New Perspectives on the Annihilation of the Herero and Nama Peoples Of Namibia, 1904-1908," Kronos: Journal Of Cape History 2008 34: 303-320