Herero and Nama genocide

File:Surviving Herero.jpg

Surviving Herero after an escape through the arid desert of Omaheke

The Herero and Namaqua Genocide occurred in German South-West Africa (modern day Namibia) from 1904 until 1907, during the scramble for Africa and was the first genocide of 20th century. On January 12 1904, the Herero people under Samuel Maharero rose in rebellion against German colonial rule. In August, German general Lothar von Trotha finally defeated the Herero in the Battle of Waterberg and drove them and their families into the desert of Omaheke, where most of them died of thirst. In October, the Nama also took up arms against the Germans, and were dealt with in a similar fashion. In total, between 24,000 and 65,000 Herero (all values are estimate) (50% to 70% of the total Herero population), and 10,000 Nama (50% of the total Nama population) perished. Two characteristics of the genocide were death by starvation and the poisoning of wells used by the Herero and Nama population that was trapped in the Namib Desert. Also round about 700 civilians german farmer and about 800 soldiers were killed by Herero.

In 1985, the United Nations’ Whitaker Report recognised Germany’s attempt to exterminate the Herero and Nama peoples of South-West Africa as one of the earliest attempts at genocide in the 20th century. The German government has also apologised for the events: Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, Germany's Aid Development Minister, declared in 2004, “We Germans accept our historic and moral responsibility.”

Before the genocide

German troops in combat with the Herero in a painting by Richard Knötel

The Herero were originally a tribe of cattle herders living in the region of modern Namibia. Formerly, Namibia was called German South West Africa and the area occupied by the Herero was known as Damaraland.

During the scramble for Africa, the British made it clear that they were not interested in the territory; so, in August 1884, it was declared a German Protectorate and, at that time, the only overseas territory deemed suitable for white settlement that had been acquired by Germany. From the outset, there was resistance by the Khoikhoi to the German occupation, although a tenuous peace was worked out in 1894. In that year, Theodor Leutwein became Governor of the territory and it underwent a period of rapid development, while Germany sent the Schutztruppe imperial troops to pacify the region.

White settlers were encouraged to settle on land taken from the natives, which caused a great deal of discontent. German colonial rule was far from egalitarian, the natives including the Herero were used as slave labourers, their lands were frequently seized and given to colonists, and resources, particularly diamond mines, were exploited by the Germans.

In 1903, some of the Nama Tribes rose in revolt under the leadership of Hendrik Witbooi, and about 60 German settlers were killed. Khoikhoi and Herero joined the Namas months later. More troops were sent from Germany to re-establish colonial rule but only succeeded in dispersing the rebels led by Chief Samuel Maharero.

In 1904, the Hereros revolted, led by Chief Samuel Maharero, and killed about 120 Germans, including women and children, and destroyed their farms. General Lothar von Trotha was dispatched in October 1904 with a force of 14,000 soldiers to resolve the crisis. He issued an appeal to the Hereros:

I, the great general of the German troops, send this letter to the Herero people... All Hereros must leave this land... Any Herero found within the German borders with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot. I shall no longer receive any women or children; I will drive them back to their people or have them fired upon. This is my decision for the Herero people.

General Lothar von Trotha's order to kill every male Herero and drive the women and children into the desert was lifted in 1904 by the Kaiser, but the massacres had already begun. When the order was lifted at the end of 1904, prisoners were herded into concentration camps and given as slave labourers to German businesses. Many prisoners died of overwork and malnutrition.

The genocide

Lothar von Trotha

German forces met the 3,000–5,000 Herero combatants at the Battle of Waterberg and defeated them decisively. The survivors retreated with their families towards Bechuanaland, after the British offered the Hereros asylum under the condition not to continue the revolt on British soil.

Some 24,000 Hereros managed to flee through a gap in the netting into the Kalahari Desert in the hope of reaching the British protectorate. German patrols later found skeletons around holes (25–50 feet deep) that were dug up in a vain attempt to find water. Maherero and 1,000 men crossed the Kalahari into Bechuanaland.

The German administration never conducted a census before 1904. Only in 1905 did a counting take place which revealed that 25,000 Herero remained in German South-West Africa.

Survivors, mostly women and children, were eventually put in concentration camps, such as that at Shark Island, similar to those used in British South Africa during the Second Boer War. The German authorities gave each Herero a number and meticulously recorded every death, whether in the camps or from forced labor, even including the name of each dead person in their reports. German enterprises were able to rent Hereros in order to use their manpower, and workers' deaths were permitted, and even reported to the German authorities. Forced labour, disease, and malnutrition killed an estimated 50–80% of the entire Herero population by 1908, when the camps were closed.

According to the 1985 United Nations’ Whitaker Report, some 65,000 Herero (80 percent of the total Herero population), and 10,000 Nama (50% of the total Nama population) were killed between 1904 and 1907. Other estimates give a total of 100,000 killed. However, German author Walter Nuhn estimates that in 1904 only 40,000 Herero lived in German South-West Africa, and therefore only 24,000 could have been killed . Recent publications consider the total of 24,000-40,000 people killed to be the most reliable estimate.

It took until 1908 to fully re-establish German authority over the territory. At the height of the campaign, some 19,000 German Troops were involved. At about the same time, diamonds were discovered in the territory and this did much to boost its prosperity. However, it was short-lived. The German colony was taken over and occupied by the Union of South Africa in 1915, in one of the colonial campaigns of World War I. South Africa received a League of Nations Mandate over South-West Africa in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles.

In 2007, descendants of Lothar von Trotha met representatives of the Herero people to seek pardon.

Rape and sexual exploitation of Herero women by German troops

Dutch historian Jan-Bart Gewald of Cologne University has written that the Germans set up special camps for their troops and that many children were born of German fathers and Herero mothers. After the most Herero males had been killed, the surviving women were forced to serve as prostitutes for the Germans.

Recognition, denial and compensation

The Herero were the first ethnic group to be subjected to genocide in the 20th century.

Larissa Förster, a Namibia expert at the Museum for Ethnology in Cologne, believes (like many modern historians) that the Herero massacre was the first genocide of the 20th century: “It was clearly a command to eliminate people belonging to a specific ethnic group and only because they were part of this ethnic group.”. It has also been linked to later events in Nazi Germany. Other researchers, accused by those who disagree with them of being historical revisionists, use the term Herero Wars: While acknowledging the massacres, they deem the evidence insufficient to call it a genocide and reject comparisons to Auschwitz as sensationalism.

Herero chained during the 1904 rebellion

In 1998, German President Roman Herzog visited Namibia and met Herero leaders. Chief Munjuku Nguvauva demanded a public apology and compensation. Herzog expressed regret but stopped short of an apology. He also pointed out that reparations were out of the question.

On August 16, 2004, the 100th anniversary of the start of the genocide, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, Germany’s development aid minister, officially apologised for the first time and expressed grief about the genocide committed by Germans, declaring, “We Germans accept our historic and moral responsibility and the guilt incurred by Germans at that time.” In addition, she admitted that the massacres were equivalent to genocide, without explicitly mentioning the concentration camps and slavery that also existed, both of which were well documented by the Germans themselves. Furthermore, she ruled out paying a special compensation, declaring that the German government already paid a yearly sum of €11.5 million as development aid for Namibia.

The Hereros filed a lawsuit in the United States in 2001 demanding reparations from the German government and the Deutsche Bank, which financed the German government and companies in Southern Africa

A short documentary, From Herero To Hitler: Planting the Seeds of a Future Genocide, is in production. The 90-minute film will look back on Germany’s colonisation of Southwest Africa and explain how the concept of Lebensraum, living space, the treatment of the indigenous population as sub-human, the creation of concentration camps, and the stated policy of annihilation were ideas and methods borrowed and adopted by the Nazis for a future genocide. The film will ask one important question: What role did Heinrich Göring and Franz Ritter von Epp, and in particular, Eugen Fischer, the first director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology in Berlin, play in the development of the political, military, and scientific methods that were ultimately to lead to the justification for and the commission of genocide? Special attention will be paid to the Einsatzgruppen as they followed the Wehrmacht into the East.

The descendants of Lothar von Trotha and the von Trotha family travelled to Omaruru in October 2007 by invitation of the royal Herero chiefs and publicly apologised for his actions. Member of the family Wolf-Thilo von Trotha: “We, the von Trotha family, are deeply ashamed of the terrible events that took place 100 years ago. Human rights were grossly abused that time.” .

Fictional representations

One chapter of Thomas Pynchon's novel V. (1963) is about the Herero genocide. A group of characters of Herero descent are also present in his Gravity's Rainbow (1974), which hints more than once at the Herero Massacre.

See also

• Colonialism
• Concentration camp
• Genocides in history
• Scramble for Africa
• German war crimes

Bibliography and documentaries

• Exterminate all the Brutes, Sven Lindqvist, London, 1996.
• A Forgotten History-Concentration Camps were used by Germans in South West Africa, Casper W. Erichsen, in the Mail and Guardian, Johannesburg, 17 August, 2001.
• Genocide & The Second Reich, BBC Four, David Olusoga, October 2004
• German Federal Archives, Imperial Colonial Office, Vol. 2089, 7 (recto)
• The Herero and Nama Genocides, 1904-1908, J.B. Gewald, in Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, New York, Macmillan Reference, 2004.
• Herero Heroes: A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia 1890 - 1923, J.B. Gewald, Oxford, Cape Town, Athens OH, 1999.
• Let Us Die Fighting: the Struggle of the Herero and Nama against German Imperialism, 1884-1915, Horst Drechsler, London, 1980.
• The Revolt of the Hereros, Jon M. Bridgman, Perspectives on Southern Africa, Berkeley, University of California, 1981.

Further reading

• Herero War - History in Pictures from Radio Bremen
• Germany Refuses to Apologize for Herero Holocaust (BlackVoices - October 14, 2002)
• Germany apologizes
• Staff Germany regrets Namibia 'genocide', BBC, 12 January, 2004
• Official German apologies (in German)
• Center for Holocaust studies under the, misspelled, title "Hereo Genocide in Namibia 1904"
• Article on debate over it being genocide
• The resistance struggle culminates in genocide: 1904-1906
• The tribe Germany wants to forget, Mail & Guardian, 13 March 1998
• Pilgrimage - Controversy - Reconciliation 1904-2004
• Genocide and the history of violent expansionism
• Atrocities committed on the Herero people during the suppression of their uprising in German South West Africa 1904-1907