Kaiser's Holocaust (30 page)

Just after noon on 22 November 1905, the twin funnels of a Woermann Line steamer appeared on the horizon, near the port of Swakopmund. On board was German South-West Africa’s first civilian governor, Friedrich von Lindequist. When the ship dropped anchor, the upper echelons of Swakopmund society assembled expectantly at the harbour side. The men wore top hats and black frock-coats, the women pristine ankle-length dresses.
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As von Lindequist stepped onto the rickety wooden jetty, a staccato click from the boot-heels of the senior army officers who lined his path in full dress uniform echoed over the cheers of the small crowd. After a few words of welcome and a brief address by the leading members of Swakopmund’s Jewish community, barely audible above the roar of the waves, the new governor was whisked away.

Friedrich von Lindequist was to rule over German South-West Africa for just one and a half years. In that time he brought peace (of a sort), oversaw rapid economic development, helped increase rates of settlement and captained an enormous programme of public works. Von Lindequist achieved all this while continuing the extermination of the Herero and Nama peoples begun by General von Trotha. To understand why and how this was possible, it is necessary to know something of the man himself.

Von Lindequist was a product of the German Colonial Department. He had served his apprenticeship in German South-West Africa itself. In 1894 – the year after the Hoornkrans massacre – von Lindequist’s uncle, a chief aide to Kaiser Wilhelm, had helped ease his nephew into the position of Deputy
Governor. For four years, von Lindequist had served under Governor Leutwein in Windhoek, forging many lasting friendships with the settlers. Photographs from the period show him side by side with the settlers, drinking beer from ornate Bavarian mugs in Windhoek’s many improvised
Biergärten
. He was, as one historian observed, ‘a settler favourite’.

Despite his image as a man of the people, von Lindequist was a deeply ambitious man. In June 1899, his determination was rewarded when he was appointed Imperial Consul to the Cape Colony, an extremely auspicious promotion for a young man of only thirty-eight. Just months after arriving in Cape Town, the potential of von Lindequist’s posting increased exponentially. On 12 October 1899, the army of the Boer Republic attacked a British armoured train at a small station north of the Kimberley diamond mines, beginning the Boer War. The German government’s official position was that the war was an unfortunate conflict fought ‘between two Christian and white races, that were of the same Germanic stock’.
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Among the German public, however, there was considerable, often vocal support for the Boers, a small republic confronting the army of the mightiest empire on earth. For the next three years, Cape Town became the best possible posting for a young, ambitious German diplomat, and von Lindequist thrust himself into the centre of the diplomatic maelstrom, travelling across frontlines and holding meetings with key British officers, including Lord Kitchener.

Despite the importance of his position and the arduous nature of his schedule, von Lindequist maintained close ties with his friends in German South-West Africa throughout his time in Cape Town. He also used his growing influence in Berlin to lobby in support of their interests. In April 1904, for example, he threw his weight behind settlers’ demands for a pre-emptive military strike against the Nama, despite the fact that the Nama had honoured their military treaties and had not shown any inclination to rise up against German rule. Von Lindequist’s uncompromising attitude towards the Africans, on this and other occasions, won him yet more admirers in both Windhoek and
Berlin. When the Colonial Department began its search for a civilian governor to take over from von Trotha, Friedrich von Lindequist was the obvious choice.
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Von Lindequist’s arrival in Swakopmund in November 1905 marked the end of what had been effectively a military dictatorship under General von Trotha. For a year and a half, ever since he had sidelined former Governor Leutwein, the general’s writ had run unchallenged. His narrow-minded, militaristic strategies – although supported at first by the settlers – had left German South-West Africa in a chaotic state. While the war had allowed certain sectors of the economy to expand out of all proportion, others had stagnated.

The central fertile areas of Hereroland, where hundreds of Germans had built their farms, were almost empty of both Herero and settlers. After two years of war many farmers had not dared return to the land they had abandoned in January 1904, let alone establish new farms. Most had remained in the larger towns, where the garrisons afforded them some sense of security. With the farms empty and the Herero decimated, cattle-rearing – the economic raison d’être of the colony – had essentially collapsed. The revival of the civil economy was high on von Lindequist’s list of priorities in 1905. However, neither this nor any of his other ambitions could be realised until the wars against the Herero and the Nama were brought to a final conclusion.
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As von Lindequist took command, around thirteen thousand Herero were in German captivity. Of these, 8,478 were held in the concentration camps; the rest had been put to work on various projects around the colony, the construction of the railways absorbing the bulk of them.
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Thousands more remained in the bush, hiding in the semi-desert areas on the fringes of the Omaheke. There they avoided German patrols and, against all expectations, continued to survive by foraging for roots.

In the south, General von Trotha had left an even more serious and seemingly intractable crisis in his wake. Although Hendrik Witbooi lay in an unmarked grave somewhere in the southern
Kalahari, the Nama War was far from over. Those Witbooi who had yielded to the leadership of sub-Kaptein Samuel Izaak had surrendered, but the rest of the Witbooi clan, along with the militias of the other rebellious Nama nations, had not. The Bethanie Nama of Cornelius Fredericks, the Franzmann Nama of Simon Kopper, the Bondelswarts of Johannes Christian and the band of men who rode with Jacob Morenga all continued to wage a war of ambushes and lightning commando raids.

Ranged against them were ten thousand German troops. Ill equipped and inexperienced, they struggled to maintain their own vulnerable supply lines, let alone suppress the Nama insurgency. Although the Witbooi had lost their most inspirational leader, their tactics were so effective and the landscape so inhospitable that, by the time von Lindequist took charge, many of his most senior commanders had come to the conclusion that the war was un-winnable.

Von Lindequist first turned his attention to the Herero and the north. In December 1905, just a month after von Lindequist arrived, Kaiser Wilhelm signed an Imperial Decree expropriating all land previously owned by the Herero. Vast tracts of Herero pasture were now available to current and future settlers, and the funds needed to expand and develop the colony’s infrastructure were in place. On the day of his arrival in Swakopmund, von Lindequist began the task of inducing the last of the Herero in the bush to surrender.

In one of his first tasks as governor, von Lindequist visited the Swakopmund concentration camp. Escorted by the camp’s military staff and members of the press, he was ushered through the barbed-wire fencing and onto a podium. From there von Lindequist surveyed the eight hundred Herero, most of them women. Despite having only a day’s warning, Missionary Vedder had done his best to disguise the true state of the prisoners by distributing some second-hand clothing. Looking down
through a pair of tiny rimless glasses that sat precariously on the ridge of his nose, von Lindequist delivered a speech to the Herero:

When trying to understand Friedrich von Lindequist’s policies as Governor of German South-West Africa it is difficult not to speculate whether his time in South Africa during the Boer War had had an impact upon his ideas and methods. As German Consul in Cape Town, von Lindequist had a unique insight into the British conduct of the war and Kitchener’s disastrous concentration-camp policy.

The rationale behind the British decision to intern Boer civilians had been, in part at least, to deny the Boer riflemen the support and succour of the civilian population and thereby undermine their insurgency. Kitchener also hoped that the imprisonment of their families would induce the Boers to surrender, and the British went as far as to give smaller rations to the families of men still in the field.

Von Lindequist’s promise to the Herero – that their suffering in the concentration camps might come to an end if their ‘compatriots, who are still in the bush’ surrendered – bears the hallmarks of Kitchener’s earlier strategy. Yet there was one crucial difference. In the Boer War the concentration camps had been part of a strategy aimed at ending an ongoing insurgency. In
German South-West Africa, the Herero were defeated when von Lindequist took command. As he admitted in mid-1906, they had no ability and no desire to fight. The concentration camps were not part of a military strategy.

Furthermore, von Lindequist had absolutely no intention of releasing the Herero inmates of the concentration camps, no matter how many of their ‘compatriots’ surrendered. Perhaps von Lindequist hoped that this false promise would seep back to the Herero in the bush, carried by the Damara men employed as guards or by Herero escapees. Another possibility is that by holding out the vague promise of freedom, von Lindequist believed he might induce the Herero in the camps to work harder or suffer their privations without complaint. Whatever his motives, von Lindequist’s speech at Swakopmund was the first in a series of deceptions.

The Swakopmund speech also marked the beginning of von Lindequist’s attempt to rewrite history. After promising the Herero better treatment if their compatriots surrendered, he went on to demand that the Herero accept blame for the war and supplicate themselves before his authority and that of the Kaiser. ‘Do you admit’, he asked them, ‘that you started this war without reason and that you yourselves carry the blame for your misery?’ To this the assembled prisoners were made to reply in unison, possibly by the missionaries, ‘Yes we know it.’ Von Lindequist then asked, ‘Do you trust that I will govern you justly and benignly from now on?’ The Herero were encouraged to reply, ‘Yes, we trust you.’ Then, von Lindequist concluded, ‘I greet you all in the name of the Kaiser; behave well and your future will be favourable.’
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Von Lindequist, the career diplomat, understood what von Trotha, the blinkered soldier, had not. He was acutely aware that Germany’s international standing was at a particularly low ebb in the first years of the twentieth century due, in part, to persistent accusations of militarism and ‘excesses’ in the colonies. In such a climate, the overt brutality of the Extermination Order and the continuing horrors of the concentration-camp system
risked damaging Germany’s reputation further. Von Lindequist set about creating an alternative history, to conceal both his own policies and the past excesses of General von Trotha.