Kaiser's Holocaust (66 page)

A scene from inside Shark Island, probably the first death camp in world history. Its mortality rates were over 70 per cent.

A German officer, Dr Gühne, poses among prisoners in the Shark Island concentration camp,
c
. June 1905.

German South-West Africa’s first civilian governor, Friedrich von Lindequist, was the man responsible for the final solution to the Nama problem: Shark Island.

A hand-drawn map, produced by the local missionary, shows the location of the concentration camps on Shark Island and around Lüderitz bay. The main camp was divided into Nama and Herero sections while another camp, run by the railway company Lenz, is situated across the harbour.

An extremely rare photograph of the Shark Island concentration camp taken through the barbed wire fence. By October 1906, more than 2,000 prisoners had been driven onto the island.

A postcard shows German soldiers packing skulls into crates, for export to university collections and race scientists in Germany.

The severed head of a Nama man – labelled ‘Hottentotte 2’. Preserved in alcohol by camp physician Dr Bofinger, human heads were sent from the Shark Island camp to race scientists in Berlin.

Dr Eugen Fischer, whose study of the Rehoboth people of South-West Africa made him Germany’s foremost race scientist.

The white residents of Windhoek gather on the site of the Windhoek concentration camp in 1912 for the inauguration of the Rider Statue, in honour of Germans who had died in the wars to exterminate the Herero and Nama.

‘A people without space’: German settlers in Windhoek,
c
.1912.

Veterans of the German colonial army carry the flags of the lost German empire through Vienna in 1939.

‘For Justice and Honour’: a Nazi propaganda poster demanding the return of the former German colonies in Africa.

Dr Eugen Fischer, Nazi Germany’s leading race scientist. A late but enthusiastic convert to the Nazi cause.