Kaiser's Holocaust (23 page)

The German Official History of the battle of the Waterberg described von Trotha’s strategy as a stunning strategic success:

Early in October 1904, six weeks after the battle of the Waterberg, the men of the German 1st Field Regiment– a unit of
Schutztruppe
commanded by General von Trotha – arrived at the last known waterhole deep inside the endless expanses of the Omaheke. Von Trotha’s men were exhausted, their supplies almost at an end and their horses on the brink of collapse. They were patently in no condition to venture further into a desert that had not even been properly mapped.

The waterhole where von Trotha and his men halted stood in a small clearing by the dry bed of the Eiseb River. It was known to the Herero as Osombo zoWindimbe. In 1904, it was a desolate backwater, and today Osombo zoWindimbe is so remote that very few Namibians have even heard of it. Nevertheless, it is one of the most important sites in Namibian history and arguably a place of major significance in the wider history of the twentieth century.
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Just after sunrise on 3 October 1904
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von Trotha’s men were woken and assembled for the daily roll-call. Once they had been brought to attention, General von Trotha appeared, with several of his most senior officers: Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, von Epp and most probably Maximilian Bayer. Turning towards his troops, the general read aloud the text of a proclamation that he had drafted the previous day. It was written in a bizarre form of pidgin that von Trotha, considering himself an expert in African affairs, believed was the appropriate language with which to intimidate the Herero:

At the end of his speech von Trotha turned his gaze towards thirty-five recently captured Herero, mainly old men, women and children. On the general’s orders, two of their number, both men, were dragged towards a makeshift gallows where they became victims of what Captain von Epp described in his dairy as a ‘theatrical hanging’.
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Copies of von Trotha’s proclamation – translated into Otjiherero and written out on small folded pieces of paper – were attached around the necks of old men, women and children who were then driven into the desert by volleys of gunfire aimed over their heads. The Extermination Order – as the Osombo zoWindimbe proclamation has become known – was the explicit and official confirmation of the policies that most German units had followed ever since the battle of the Waterberg. It ended any pretence that the war was being fought to end the uprising. The aim of the conflict was to eradicate the Herero as an ethnic group from German South-West Africa, either by their extermination or by their wholesale expulsion from the colony. A single copy of the original Extermination Order has survived and is in the Botswana National Archives in Gaberone. It is an almost unique document: an explicit, written declaration of intent to commit genocide.

The day after issuing the Extermination Order, von Trotha wrote to the General Staff explaining the new policy to his superiors.

In the same report, von Trotha reiterated his belief that the extermination of the Herero was merely a phase in a wider racial war in Africa, a conflict he had long predicted was inevitable: ‘This uprising is and remains the beginning of a racial struggle, which I foresaw as early as 1897 in my reports to the Imperial Chancellor.’
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The actual military plan surrounding the Extermination Order called for the abandonment of the pursuit into the Omaheke. Only one unit, Major von Estorff’s, would continue to operate in the desert. The vast bulk of the army was to be distributed along the border between the Omaheke and the Waterberg itself, forming a cordon to prevent groups of Herero from returning to their former homelands. Any Herero caught on the border between the desert and Hereroland were to be shot on sight.

Von Trotha was aware from the beginning of the potential damage the Extermination Order represented to ‘the good reputation that the German soldier has acquired’. In a supplementary order he stipulated that while he was in ‘no doubt that as a result of this order no more male prisoners will be taken’, he was equally confident that ‘neither will it give rise to atrocities committed on women and children. These will surely run away after two rounds of shots have been fired over their heads.’
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Driven back into the desert, these women and children would simply die of thirst and malnutrition or be forced out of the colony.

All units not required for the operations on the border of the Omaheke were to be sent east, back into Hereroland, to execute the second half of von Trotha’s plan. Once resupplied, these troops were formed into what became known as
Aufklaerungspatrouillen
– Cleansing Patrols. Their task was to sweep across Hereroland and ‘clean up the entire district of broken groups of Hereros’.

As von Trotha was well aware, there were several thousand Herero still within Hereroland. They fell into two categories. The first were escapees from the battle of the Waterberg, who had managed to avoid German patrols and move back towards their homelands. The second were Herero who had not been at the Waterberg and, in many cases, had taken no part in the
rebellion. Although at least fifty thousand Herero had gathered at the Waterberg under their Paramount Chief Samuel Maharero, there were still perhaps twenty to thirty thousand Herero who had stayed in their villages throughout the uprising. Many lived in isolated settlements in the northern and western parts of the colony, far from the areas of white settlement. Not only had some of these communities not taken part in the uprising, they may well have known very little about the war at all. Such communities spent 1904 living in their traditional villages preoccupied with the daily difficulties of keeping themselves and their cattle alive. On von Trotha’s orders, these people were to be shot on sight.
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They proved easy targets for the German patrols. Time and again the diaries of commanders in the Cleansing Patrols reveal that their attacks were focused upon ordinary Herero villages, rather than upon anything resembling a military force. This fact is borne out by the low rates of casualties (from action rather than disease) among the men of the German units.

There are very few descriptive passages in the diaries and dispatches of the soldiers involved in the Cleansing Patrol, but there are a few unguarded phrases that hint at the slaughter that took place across Hereroland in 1904 and 1905. Wilhelm Lorang, a soldier in von Epp’s company, later explained that, as he understood it, the Extermination Order permitted the Germans to ‘shoot, kill, hang. Whatever you liked. Old or young. Men, women, children.’ According to Pastor Elger, a missionary based in the Herero town of Karibib, the motto of the Patrols became ‘Clean out, hang up, shoot down till they are all gone.’
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From Africans working for the
Schutztruppe
, there is another set of accounts that describe in more detail the actions of the Cleansing Patrols. In late 1904 Hendrik Campbell, a member of the mixed-race Baster people from the town of Rehoboth, was in command of a contingent of Baster men compelled to fight for the Germans under the terms of their protection treaty. Campbell and his men witnessed the actions of one of the Cleansing Patrols in the last weeks of 1904:

The area over which the Cleansing Patrols operated was 100,000 square miles in size. Although the Germans considered the entire region ‘Hereroland’, it was also home to communities of Damara, Owambo and San. Most soldiers had only been in the colony a few months and could not distinguish these different African peoples. Many of those killed by the Cleansing Patrols were almost certainly non-Herero. Hundreds of miles from their senior commanders, operating on the fringes of an endless desert and under orders to shoot Herero on sight, it may well have been a very small step for exhausted men to reinterpret their orders as a licence to kill all Africans.

On occasion, the Cleansing Patrols were unable to reach bands of Herero in the desert and instead sent lone messengers out into the bush in the hope of luring them into ambushes with false promises. In the most famous case, a group of some three hundred Herero, who had made camp on the western perimeter of the Omaheke Desert, were located by a German patrol. On 29 October the Germans sent a messenger to the Herero camp to assure them that if they reported to the waterhole of Ombakaha, 20 miles to the east, they would be allowed to surrender and their lives would be spared.
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The next day, their leader Joel Kavezeri and eighty of his men set out for Ombakaha to accept the German offer. When they arrived they were offered some tobacco and – as it was noon – were permitted to sit in the shade of a tree. They then entered into negotiations with the local German commander, Lieutenant
von Beesten, who, in the middle of their conversation, suddenly ran for cover, shouting orders for his troops to open fire. One of the few survivors, Gerard Kamaheke later described what had happened:

In the Official German History of the campaign in South-West Africa, Ombakaha is described as a battle, yet not a single German soldier was killed or wounded. In his own report, Lieutenant von Beesten noted that ‘all enemy fighters were shot at distances between 10 and 300 metres’ – the optimum range of the Maxim gun.
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Ombakaha was not an isolated event. Across Hereroland, bands of Herero were tricked into believing it was safe to return from the bush, and then killed. Such massacres encouraged the Herero to move into the more remote parts of their territory or enter the Omaheke.

Despite its brutality, it was evident as early as November 1904 that the Extermination Order and its agents were failing to ethnically cleanse South-West Africa of the Herero. Furthermore, extended operations even in the more fertile areas of Hereroland had pushed von Trotha’s men to the very limit of their endurance. About half of the soldiers involved in operations against the Herero were suffering from the effects of typhoid, dehydration or chronic dysentery. On 25 October Senior Lieutenant Haak (who was to die in action a month later in one of his first active engagements) described the state of a group of
Schutztruppe
recently arrived in Windhoek from the bush:

It seems that Theodor Leutwein became fully aware of the Extermination Order only some weeks after it had been proclaimed at Osombo zoWindimbe. Still nominally Governor of South-West Africa, Leutwein was horrified by von Trotha’s policy, more on economic than humanitarian grounds. On 23 October he wrote to the Colonial Department informing them that Chief Salatiel Kambazembi – one of the key Herero chiefs under Samuel Maharero – had requested negotiations to end the war. Leutwein also requested formal confirmation that as civilian governor he had the authority to accept a Herero surrender.