Kaiser's Holocaust (24 page)

During the tussle for power that followed, von Trotha wrote to Leutwein admitting that the battle of the Waterberg had failed to exterminate the Herero and explaining how his new policy would lead to their ultimate annihilation, no matter what obstacles Leutwein might put in his way: ‘the eastern border of the colony will remain sealed off and terrorism will be employed against the Herero showing up. That nation must vanish from the face of the earth. Having failed to destroy them with guns, I will have to achieve my end in that way.’
15

Von Trotha sought support for his extermination policy from the army, and again, the civilian branches of government were pushed aside. Leutwein effectively resigned and was given leave. After eleven years as governor, he left the colony. The military rule that von Trotha had declared on his arrival in Windhoek in June 1904 was now unchallenged.

It is a mark of the brutality of German colonialism in South-West Africa that Governor Theodor Leutwein and Major von Estorff – of whom we shall hear more later – are almost heroes in this sorry history. The
Alte Afrikaners
(Old Africans), as von Trotha called men like Erstorff and Leutwein, had few moral qualms over disinheriting Africans of their land and property. They set out systematically to undermine their social structures and adopted a culturally corrosive policy of divide and rule. But their conception of colonialism still had a role for the Africans, if only a subservient one. The gulf between the policies and attitudes of Leutwein and Erstorff, and those of Lothar von Trotha, was symptomatic of the great shift from the old paternalist racism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and to the new biological racism of the twentieth century.

Although Theodor Leutwein’s policies resulted in his removal from office, he had nonetheless been completely correct in concluding that von Trotha’s plan to exterminate the Herero was logistically and militarily impractical. By November 1904 the appalling conditions of von Trotha’s men and the impossibility of their task had become apparent to the military authorities in Berlin. On 23 November General von Schlieffen, still in overall command of the strategy of the war, wrote to Chancellor von Bülow that ‘while von Trotha’s intentions are commendable, he is powerless to carry them out’.
16
Chancellor von Bülow and the civilian officials of the Colonial Department did not share von Schlieffen’s admiration for von Trotha’s intention. In the early stages of the war von Bülow’s coalition government, swept along by an overwhelming popular support for the war, had supported the generals’ hard line. However, when Chancellor von Bülow received the text of the Extermination Order, he was horrified.

Von Bülow feared that Germany’s international reputation, already tarnished by her actions in East Africa and China, would be further damaged should the Extermination Order become
widely known. In the same year that Germany sent von Trotha to crush the Herero, the international campaign against the horrors in the Congo Free State reached its apex. Under Leopold’s regime, millions of Congolese women had been kidnapped and their men forced to collect increasingly unrealistic quotas of wild rubber. When quotas were not met or resistance offered, the mercenaries of the King’s
Force Publique
had inflicted barbaric punishments and unleashed murderous raids against innocent villagers. During the autumn of 1904, the newspapers of Europe and America carried almost daily reports cataloguing the barbarity of Leopold’s colony and condemning the King himself in the harshest terms. With details of the war in South-West Africa beginning to appear in the foreign press, Von Bülow feared that von Trotha’s policies, in particular the Extermination Order, might be seen in the same light and had the potential to ‘demolish Germany’s reputation among civilised nations and indulge foreign agitation’.
17

It is perhaps unsurprising that Kaiser Wilhelm, the man who did more to undermine Germany’s reputation than any of his contemporaries, was blind to the dangers of the Extermination Order and von Trotha’s brutality. Wilhelm continued to applaud von Trotha’s ‘vigorous action’ and energy, long after the Extermination Order had become a matter of grave concern to German politicians. Untroubled by the potential scandal the Kaiser wrote to the general: ‘You have entirely fulfilled my expectations when I named you commander of the colonial troops, and I take pleasure in expressing, once again, my utter gratitude for your accomplishments so far.’
18

In late November 1904, Wilhelm was confronted by both his Chancellor, von Bülow, and his Chief of the General Staff, von Schlieffen. Von Bülow complained that German policy in South-West Africa was barbaric and potentially scandalous, while von Schlieffen considered von Trotha’s strategy commendable but utterly impractical. What followed was a battle of wills between the Kaiser and von Bülow.

Von Bülow’s office requested that Wilhelm rescind the Extermination Order with immediate effect. Rather than
responding, the Kaiser and his entourage left Berlin on a five-day hunting trip to his Hohenlohe estate in eastern Prussia. Only on 8 December – five days after receiving the Chancellor’s request – did Wilhelm finally agree that von Trotha should also ‘treat mercifully those Herero who voluntarily surrender’.
19
When von Bülow asked the Kaiser to agree to a specific text explicitly withdrawing the Extermination Order, Wilhelm took another eight days to reply. Meanwhile the killing in Hereroland continued.

When General von Trotha received the telegraph of his new orders, he was reportedly enraged and instantly offered his resignation, which was refused. In an attempt to appease him, von Schlieffen reassured von Trotha that ‘His Majesty has not forbidden you to shoot the Hereros’, rather that ‘the possibility of showing mercy is to be restored’.

Just four days after agreeing to rescind von Trotha’s Extermination Order, Kaiser Wilhelm received a report he had secretly commissioned some weeks earlier. On 10 November 1904, the Kaiser had personally instructed Count Georg von Stillfried und Rattonitz, an officer in von Trotha’s army on sick leave in Germany, to report ‘on his views on the native question and military conditions in South-West Africa, in the past two years’. He had not informed Chancellor von Bülow, the Reichstag or General von Schlieffen, circumventing all official channels of civilian and military authority.

Although he only held the rank of Lieutenant, Count von Stillfried was an aristocrat and as such was trusted by the Kaiser. Stillfried had first arrived in South-West Africa in 1900 and been placed in command of a small unit of troops. By all accounts, he was admired by his men and fellow officers alike. He had fought at the Waterberg, and had a genuine understanding of the colony and German operations therein. On 12 December, exactly eleven months after the start of the war, Stillfried’s report – fifty-five
pages long and painstakingly handwritten in neat gothic calligraphy – was presented to the Kaiser. Stillfried recommended that in order to ensure the Herero would pose no future threat to German colonialism, ‘The surviving natives have to be disarmed all and one, and anyone in possession of a rifle should be punished with death.’ The chiefs, the dynasties around which the Herero nation was built, were to be eradicated, to ensure the docility of the Herero. Stillfried recommended that ‘All chiefs should be executed and their families – even if they are innocent – should be deported to another colony so that they will never again gain influence among their people.’
20

What distinguishes Stillfried’s recommendations from the policies of General von Trotha is that they took into account the economic realities of the colony. Stillfried understood that the war to annihilate the Herero had generated a compelling argument for their continued survival, in the short term at least. During the conflict the demand for cheap labour had become so acute that it enormously increased the value of the Herero as an economic asset. However, the means by which Stillfried proposed the labour of the Herero be exploited was profoundly different from anything Theodor Leutwein had ever suggested. He recommended that ‘All natives from the warring tribes, apart from those who work for the Government, should be leased out either in large or small numbers to private persons, farmers and merchants and so forth. Here they should perform labour for food.’
21
He went on,

‘Confined Areas’ –
Geschlossenen Niederlassungen
– was the critical phrase in the Stillfried Report. It alluded to a device that had been disastrously deployed only three years earlier during
the Boer War. There the British commander-in-chief, Lord Herbert Kitchener, had forced around thirty thousand Boer women and children, and over one hundred thousand black and coloured Africans, into large enclosures of barbed wire, several layers thick. Poorly run, insanitary, and badly provisioned, these enclosures saw over twenty-five thousand Boer civilians, and perhaps as many as fourteen thousand Africans die, most from disease and the effects of malnutrition. In the British Parliament, the Liberal MPs C. P. Scott and John Ellis had condemned the practice and described the enclosures as ‘concentration camps’.
23

The military rationale for the British use of concentration camps in the Boer War had been to separate a guerrilla army from a local civilian population from whom they received susten ance and among whom they took refuge. Four years earlier, the Spanish rulers of Cuba had forced civilians into similar camps during the revolt of 1896. The concentration camp was therefore not a new concept, but the way in which Count Stillfried recommended it should be applied was entirely novel. When Kitchener had launched his clearance campaign and set up the camps, British intelligence believed that there were twenty thousand Boer guerrillas still in the field. In South-West Africa, the Herero were already a defeated and scattered people. They were not engaged in a guerrilla war and, following the battle of the Waterberg and the disintegration of Herero leadership, they had not been able to field anything resembling a military force.

Stillfried’s ‘confined areas’ were to be both concentration camps and work camps. It was this addition of forced labour that was to make the concentration camps of German South-West Africa so disastrous for the thousands of people imprisoned within them.

A copy of the Stillfried Report, full of marginal notes written by the Kaiser, was sent to the Reich Chancellery around Christmas 1904. Stillfried’s recommendations for forced labour appealed to Chancellor von Bülow and others who feared for Germany’s reputation the longer the war dragged on. Work camps suggested that the Herero nation would be permitted to
survive, albeit as virtual slaves. As it was widely believed that Africans were inherently lazy, forced labour was even considered a means of moral and cultural ‘upliftment’.