Kaiser's Holocaust (25 page)

On 14 January 1905, the dispute over policy in South-West Africa was resolved when revised orders, incorporating many of Count Stillfried’s proposals, were wired to von Trotha. The general was directly ordered to establish a number of what the orders termed
Konzentrationslager
– a literal translation of the English ‘concentration camp’. Enshrining Stillfried’s ideas into official policy, Chancellor von Bülow specifically stated that ‘the surrendering Herero should be … put under guard and required to work’.
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The new orders were intentionally vague, so as not to preclude field executions or halt the actions of the Cleansing Patrols. In the orders that von Trotha sent to his officers in the field, he made it clear that the continuation of military operations against the Herero was to take precedence over the administration of the camps or the feeding of surrendering Herero in the concentration camps.

In order to bring the Herero into the camps, the Cleansing Patrols were permitted to take prisoners. However, many officers and soldiers followed General von Trotha’s lead and interpreted their new orders as narrowly as possible. Several units continued to hunt and kill Herero, and Herero were still attacked while attempting to surrender. Many were lured out of hiding by the assurances of African messengers sent into the bush. Even in the face of this continued violence, thousands were induced to surrender, and as early as February 1905 it was apparent that many more Herero had been able to survive than the Germans had imagined possible. Perhaps as many as thirty thousand had lived by foraging for wild onions and roots, and hunting small game. By the end of 1904, over four months after the battle of the Waterberg, what little food there was to be found in Hereroland had been consumed. According to the Herero’s own oral histories, their malnourishment was so severe that they had taken to eating scorpions. By February and
March 1905, their suffering was such that thousands began to surrender, independent of the collection patrols.
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They emerged like ghosts from the Omaheke and the distant corners of Hereroland. They dragged themselves into the German towns of Omaruru, Karibib, Windhoek and Okahandja. Most were women and children, and all were in an appalling state of advanced malnutrition. Pastor Elger, a missionary in Karibib, a small town in western Hereroland, described the Herero who arrived there as being ‘mere skeletons covered by a thin film of skin’.
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Unsure how to deal with the influx, most settlers stood aside and watched as malnourished Herero died on their streets. When the District Commander of Omaruru made the mistake of expressing some concern for their plight, he was compelled to apologise publicly in a newspaper and reassure the local settlers that he was not guilty of ‘dizzy humanitarianism’.
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As early as February 1905, the Herero who had surrendered in the German towns, along with those collected directly from the bush, were loaded in open cattle-trucks or marched in human caravans by soldiers into the hastily constructed concentration camps.

There were five main camps. Each had been located in or near a site of German settlement, as it was there that the need for African labour was most pressing. The largest camp – with a capacity of seven thousand – was in the capital, Windhoek, on the steep slopes that led down from the walls of the German fortress. Two smaller camps were set up in the former Herero homelands at Karibib and Okahandja, where the Germans planned to expand their farming operations and would need a steady supply of free labour. The last two camps were established in the coastal towns of Swakopmund and Lüderitz – the colony’s two ports.
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Most of the records, both military and civilian, for the concentration camps of German South-West Africa have been lost or
were deliberately destroyed to prevent them falling into the hands of the South Africans in 1915. However, a surprising amount of official documentation from the camp at Swakopmund has survived. Historians know relatively more about the Swakopmund camp thanks, in large part, to the work of two remarkable local figures. The first was the civilian District Commissioner for the town of Swakopmund, Dr Fuchs. An efficient and punctilious civil servant, Fuchs carried out an investigation into conditions in the camp that reveals a wealth of detail and demonstrates that knowledge of the suffering of the prisoners extended far up the chains of command, in both Windhoek and Berlin.
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The other resident of Swakopmund whose testimony is critical is the local Rhenish Missionary, Heinrich Vedder.

Missionaries like Vedder were the only non-military personnel permitted to enter the camps. They were allowed to take Sunday services and conduct funerals. Some were even given permission to set up small hospices inside the camps, where they tended the dying and administered the last rights. They also supplied books, most commonly the Bible, and in some camps they struggled to keep up with demand.
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Heinrich Vedder had only recently arrived in the colony when he was given the task of setting up a mission among the prisoners in Swakopmund in early 1905. Young and energetic, Vedder became one of the most vocal of the missionaries. His letters – and the responses from missionaries working in other camps – tell us not only about the Swakopmund camp but about the whole concentration-camp system. In an entry in the
Swakopmund Missionary Chronicle
of December 1905, Vedder painted a vivid picture of the conditions in the Swakopmund camp. He tells us that the Herero

The appalling suffering of the Herero in the Swakopmund concentration camp was directly linked to the success of Swakopmund’s economy. The town had become German South-West Africa’s main port. Despite the fact that it had no natural harbour and was an extremely poor anchorage, it had overtaken Walvis Bay in both size and importance. Twice a week, a steamer from the Woermann Company arrived offshore, bringing supplies and reinforcements, along with goods and new settlers seeking refuge from Germany’s overcrowded cities.

The desperate need for labour in Swakopmund was a direct consequence of its lack of a natural harbour. Unable to dock, the Woermann ocean liners were forced to anchor offshore and unload their cargoes into flat-bottomed transport boats that ferried both goods and passengers to the shore. In 1905, the inmates of the concentration camps were used to unload these transport ferries and carry the goods up to depots inland. Others were used to build an extension to a wooden jetty. Others again were formed into work gangs and made to labour on the construction of government buildings and even private residences.

The main concentration camp in Swakopmund was administered by the army and was located somewhere near the northern entrance of the town, near the coastline. A number of concentration camps came into existence, at various times. The largest of them was the military camp, which often held more than 1,000 prisoners at a time. It was located near the waterfront, where the labour of the inmates was required.
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Prisoners in Swakopmund, like those in the other camps across the colony, were given utterly inadequate food rations. In von Trotha’s initial orders of 16 January he had specifically instructed military commanders in charge of the camps to keep rations to an absolute minimum. The
Portionsliste
, the army’s ration list, placed concentration-camp prisoners just above mules and horses in order of priorities. The official camp ration was 500 grams of rice or flour per day, calculated on the presumption that prisoners of war were male. Women and children – who made up the vast majority of the camp’s population – were often given half rations. As neither rice nor flour was known to the Herero, they had no knowledge of how to cook it. In many cases, the prisoners were not even provided with pots or pans with which to prepare their food. The prisoners ate these unfamiliar rations raw, unaware that uncooked they caused diarrhoea. As early as 1 March 1905, in a letter to the Mission Headquarters in Wupperthal, Missionary Vedder complained that the ‘people suffer their daily meal of rice, which due to the lack of pots is very difficult to prepare … hundreds are breaking down due to the lack of nutrition and are dying’.
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In Swakopmund, as in the other coastal camp in the southern port of Lüderitz, the deleterious effects of insufficient and inappropriate food were considerably augmented by the cold maritime climate. The coastal strip of the Namib Desert has its own distinct microclimate. When the skies are clear and there are no winds, temperatures on the coast can be almost as high as those in the desert itself, but such conditions are rare. On most days a thick bank of sea-fog shrouds the coastline, blocking out the sun. Even on clear days, the warmth of the sun is often counteracted by icy winds that rush inland from the South Atlantic.

To help them acclimatise to the conditions at Swakopmund, the missionaries and the local army commanders issued some of the prisoners with second-hand clothing, but in February 1905 von Trotha personally intervened to stop this. Instead prisoners were issued with rough hessian sacks, with holes cut out for their arms and heads. These were almost entirely ineffective against
the ocean winds. The predictable result of exposing an already weakened population to malnutrition and freezing temperatures was the rapid spread of disease: influenza, dysentery and scurvy – believed by the Germans to be infectious – as well as pneumonia, smallpox, syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases. As in all the concentration camps, there was no sanitation at Swakopmund and the sick were left untended, lying for days or weeks in their own excrement. The camp quickly became infested with flies and maggots, which spread infection further.
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The awful decline in the health of prisoners, caused by conditions in the Swakopmund camp, was not permitted to stand in the way of their exploitation as forced labour. In all the concentration camps Herero prisoners were placed under the jurisdiction of the army’s Military Supply Division, known as the
Etappenkommando
. The civilian administration was able to requisition Herero prisoners from the army free of cost. The regu lations under which labour was distributed specifically stated that prisoners were to receive food ‘but no payment’. Private individuals and companies were also able to hire Herero labourers from the
Etappenkommando
for a
Kopfsteuer
– ‘Head Tax’, of fifty pfennig per day, or ten Reichsmarks per month. All profits were siphoned directly into the coffers of the colonial government.
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The method by which the army kept track of the thousands of Herero in the camp system had been suggested in the Stillfried Report. In early 1905, tens of thousands of oval-shaped metal tags stamped with the Kaiser’s crown were produced in Dresden and shipped out to the colony. Dissatisfied with this arrangement, von Trotha proposed that prisoners be permanently marked with their identification numbers. Whether he imagined branding or tattooing is not clear.
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Due to the lack of male prisoners, it was mainly women and children as young as twelve who were rented out to private individuals. Girls and younger women were in particularly high demand as domestic servants. On 29 March the colonial
government under von Trotha introduced formal regulations for the renting out of the prisoners. The local civilian administration was made respons ible for collating all requests for Herero labour. These requests were then transmitted to the
Etappenkommando
.

The distribution of Herero prisoners to private settlers and soldiers became so widespread that the colonial government eventually passed an ordinance forbidding officers from taking their Herero servants home to Germany at the end of their terms of service. One of those caught flouting this regulation was Count Stillfried himself, recently promoted to the rank of captain. When Stillfried returned to South-West Africa in April 1906 he brought with him his wife and child, for whom he acquired a Herero man named Franz as a servant. When he finally came home in 1908 Stillfried attempted to ‘export’ Franz and, despite his rank and status, was arrested and court-martialled for the offence. In spite of overwhelming evidence against him, the Count was acquitted, his letter of acquittal signed by the Kaiser personally.
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