Kaiser's Holocaust (48 page)

Fittingly, the Nazi stronghold in South-West Africa was the town of Lüderitz. Not only did the town have its own party office and branch of the Hitler Youth, it was also home to a chapter of the
Stahlhelm
, a fanatic grouping of former frontline soldiers and
Freikorps
, who in Germany were eventually incorporated into the Brown Shirts. Wilfried Lubowski, a former member of the Lüderitz Hitler Youth, recalled in an interview that after the Nazis had come to power in Germany, the Jewish population were jeered at in the street. Rotten eggs and even rocks were thrown at their shops and some emigrated to South Africa.

By the mid-1930s Hitler’s birthday was openly celebrated in South-West Africa, a tradition that outlived the Third Reich and Hitler. In 1936, when the Windhoek Brewery failed to hoist the Nazi banner in honour of the Führer, a boycott by German settlers was only narrowly averted.

In the 1930s, the potent image of South-West Africa under the spell of the Nazi revolution proved to be a less powerful
propaganda device than the nostalgic image of German South-West Africa before the Great War. A disproportionate number of the more successful pro-colonial novels and memoirs published between the wars were set in German South-West Africa, the colony that attracted the largest number of German settlers and had always been most firmly associated with romantic, frontier fantasies.

The memoirs of Margarethe von Eckenbrecher,
Was Afrika
Mir Gab und Nahm
(What Africa Gave to Me and What It Took Away), although originally published in 1909, went through a series of reprints during the inter-war years and continued to woo readers well into the Nazi era with its highly romanticised recollections of the life of a settler woman in German South-West Africa.

Another important book set in German South West Africa was
Verschüttete Volksseele: Nach Berichten aus Südwestafrika
(The Buried Folk Soul: Reports from South-West Africa). It was the work of Dr Mathilde Ludendorff, the mystic philosopher and wife of General Erich Ludendorff – the man who had been one of the driving forces behind schemes for German settlement in Poland, the Baltic and the Ukrainian Crimea during World War I.
Verschüttete Volksseele
was based on a collection of letters from settlers in German South-West Africa that had been collated by Mathilde Ludendorff over several years. It painted the settler society, as it had existed in German South-West Africa just before World War I, as one in which the settlers had discovered their true German identity. Not only was
Verschüttete
Volksseele
deeply nostalgic for the lost colony, it continued the tradition – begun by Friedrich von Lindequist – of rewriting the history of the wars that had led to the virtual extermination of the Herero and Nama peoples. Mathilde Ludendorff claimed that the wars against the Herero and Nama had been racially justified. She also wildly exaggerated the numbers of settlers who had died in the initial outburst of violence.

Similar historical distortions characterised another hugely popular book from the inter-war period. Gustav Frenssen’s
Peter Moor’s Fahrt nach Südwest
(Peter Moor’s Adventures in South-West Africa) was a simplistic dramatised account of the Herero-Nama genocides, based closely on interviews with veterans of the German
Schutztruppe
. The novel gripped its (mainly young) readers with tales of danger and heroism. Repeatedly, over the course of the story, Frenssen justified the destruction of the Herero and Nama by allowing his characters to regurgitate the traditional racist caricatures found in the German press during the genocides. Peter Moor, the central character, discovers the Herero to be untrustworthy and primitive. He dismisses them as barbaric peoples, doomed to a just and inevitable extinction. Frenssen’s novel was the best-selling children’s book in Germany until 1945.

The most important colonial novel of the inter-war era was
Volk Ohne Raum
(People Without Space). It was the work of Hans Grimm, Germany’s greatest purveyor of colonial fairy tales. A former professor of law, Grimm had briefly lived in German South-West Africa and spent many years in South Africa. The novel is set partly in German South-West Africa during the Herero-Nama genocides. But
Volk Ohne Raum
is more than mere nostalgia: it is a political tract posing as a novel. It tells the barely believable story of Cornelius Freibott, a naive Candide-like figure whose journey across the globe and through his troubled life leads him to adopt the same political opinions as his creator. The book was so popular, and so important in keeping alive the memory of the colonies and popularising the
Lebensraum
theory in inter-war Germany, that its somewhat ridiculous plot is worth describing in detail.

Freibott’s misadventures begin when he and his father are forced to abandon their lives as traditional peasant farmers, and seek employment in industry. Denied a pure
Völkisch
life on the land, Freibott escapes industry and, after joining the navy, finds himself in Africa, the continent that is to change his life. In the British Cape Colony, he learns of Britain’s enormous colonial power and imbibes the classic Pan-Germanic hatred of Britain as a force holding Germany back for her own selfish interests. In
Africa, Freibott also recognises that colonial expansion has provided Britain with an enormous ‘living space’. The empire, he concludes, has permitted millions of British emigrants to avoid the ravages of industrialism and modernity, the forces that had atomised his own family in Germany.

Freibott is then swept up into the Boer War and persecuted by the British for fighting with the Boers. Interned in a prisoner-of-war camp, he finally grasps the message that the Pan-Germans and colonial societies had been trying to explain all along: German emigrants can only be free in colonies of their own, and Germany herself can only be rid of her problems when she acquires enough colonial living space to accommodate her people without space. Inspired by his epiphany, Freibott journeys to the only place on earth where German settlers have found
Lebensraum
– German South-West Africa. The date is 1907.

As Hans Grimm had lived in South Africa between 1897 and 1911 and was briefly resident in German South-West Africa, he knew the crimes his countrymen had committed against the Herero and Nama. However, he was equally well versed in the alternative history used to cover up the genocides, and it is this myth that provides the backdrop for Freibott’s adventures in the colony. There is no mention of the concentration camps or the Extermination Order in
Volk Ohne Raum
. By contrast, British misdeeds committed during the Boer War are covered in exhaustive detail.

After further adventures in Africa, Freibott returns to Germany in the early 1920s in order to preach the importance of
Lebensraum
to his fellow countrymen. On his return he learns another critical lesson: that the Jews, although masters of the German language, are not members of ‘the tribes which constitute the Germans and the German Reich’. In a final twist, Freibott is murdered by a misguided socialist at the very moment he comes fully to understand Germany’s mission in the world.

Grimm’s
Volk Ohne Raum
is today dismissed as a work of breathtakingly poor quality. It weighs in at over 1,500 pages, is
badly written (even compared to Grimm’s other works) and populated entirely by two-dimensional characters who are little more than mouthpieces for the author’s own racial and political views. Grimm’s formula – crude and simplistic though it may have been – was nevertheless a sensational success. Between its publication in 1926 and 1935, 315,000 copies of
Volk Ohne Raum
were sold. By 1942 sales had reached over half a million.
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Volk Ohne Raum
– the most successful of Grimm’s books – was in effect Friedrich Ratzel’s
Lebensraum
theory told through the experiences of a German everyman, and Grimm’s book arguably did more to keep the concept of
Lebensraum
current, during the interregnum between the Second and Third Reichs, than any propaganda campaign. Critically for the Nazis, who praised the book and its author effusively,
Volk Ohne Raum
reminded the German people that
Lebensraum
– the ideological foundation upon which South-West Africa had been conquered and ethnically cleansed – was the same concept that underpinned the Nazis’ calls for territorial expansion and national renewal. Germany needed
Lebensraum
now as much as it had before the Great War, Grimm told his readers. A Nazi propaganda poster of the 1930s made the same connections. It showed a map of Africa with the four lost colonies highlighted. The text read: ‘Here also is our living space.’ The ‘also’ is critical. It spoke of the belief that while the African empire might be won back, Germany had other and equally valid claims to living space elsewhere.

Through Ratzel’s
Lebensraum
theory, Nazi ambition could be linked with the supposed injustices of the past. The word
Lebensraum
itself, along with the phrase
Volk Ohne Raum
, became constant refrains on the streets and in the meeting halls of Hitler’s Germany. As well as appearing on posters and being incorporated into the plots of novels, arguments for the expansion of Germany’s Raum were slipped into the subtexts of films and hammered home from the lectern and in innumerable political tracts. By the late 1930s it was taken as axiomatic
that Germany was chronically overcrowded, and
Lebensraum
was transformed from a dubious nineteenth-century Social Darwinian theory to something akin to a national religion. Millions believed that as a strong and vigorous race the Germans had a right to expand beyond the borders ascribed to their nation at Versailles, and to do so at the expense of other nations and other races.

The two regions of the earth in which millions of Germans earnestly believed their nation had legitimate claims to seek
Lebensraum
were the former colonies in Africa and the European East. Both shared a common narrative. Both, it was felt, had been unjustly stolen. Bitterness about both losses was palpable in inter-war Germany, a land that abounded with veterans’ organisations and fellowships of old comrades. While veterans of the Western Front comforted themselves with the myth of the ‘stab in the back’, veterans of the East, along with the former
Schutztruppe
of the colonial empire, harboured a different grievance. They railed against the loss of the
Lebensraum
they had conquered on two continents, and alongside their bitterness grew a sense of entitlement to the lands from which they had been expelled.