Kaiser's Holocaust (22 page)

The abundance of men and equipment at von Trotha’s disposal were the fruits of the 585 million marks raised in extraordinary loans by the Colonial Department to pay for the war. The colony itself – impoverished as ever – was able to contribute only 110 million towards its own defence.
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Economically as well as militarily, the extent to which Germany was willing to stretch herself in order to punish the Herero – a people who had months earlier stopped attacking German settlers – was hugely disproportionate.

In early August, as his men began to assemble around the Waterberg, General von Trotha issued orders stating that it was imperative that all units avoid alarming or provoking the Herero, who were well aware of the build-up of German forces. Von Trotha could only contemplate the annihilation of fifty thousand people because they were concentrated in an area just 30 miles long and 20 wide. If the Herero were to disperse, not only would they slip the trap, but there was a risk that Germany would be dragged into a protracted and possibly un-winnable war fought over vast distances. One soldier wrote to his parents: ‘We have been lying here for some time now. We will be here until the mousetrap closes if the Herero do us the favour of not escaping.’

Despite von Trotha’s strict orders, there were a number of minor skirmishes. Just days before the attack, his own nephew, Lieutenant Thilo von Trotha, was involved in two conflicts that led to the shooting of seventy Herero. The younger von Trotha was reprimanded by his uncle, who warned that such premature actions ‘have to be avoided if the aim of the war, annihilation of the whole lot, is to be achieved’.

The Herero simply allowed the Germans to assemble around them at the Waterberg. Samuel Maharero failed to launch a pre-emptive strike when the Germans were at their most vulnerable. Nor did he attempt to break through the encirclement. Maharero seems to have rejected the idea of attempting flight
across the Omaheke in the dry month of August, possibly because the very old and very young would have found the journey nearly impossible and few of the Herero’s precious cattle were likely to survive such an exodus. Furthermore, the Herero were tending a number of their people – including women and children – who had been wounded at the battle of Okanjira.

Samuel Maharero’s inaction at the Waterberg was most probably a result of his belief that at any moment he could enter negotiations with the Germans and the war would come to an end. Indeed, ever since arriving at the Waterberg, the Herero had been expecting negotiations and had made repeated overtures to the Germans. While von Trotha sought to avoid clashes in order to keep the Herero concentrated at the Waterberg, Samuel Maharero kept his men at arm’s length from the Germans in order to facilitate peace negotiations. He even allowed a German unit to inspect the Waterberg mission and police station, both sacked in the early days of the conflict and both well within the Herero’s lines of defence.

From the Herero viewpoint, their victory at the battle of Oviumbo four months earlier had been a clear demonstration of their power and determination to fight for their land and traditions. They had not only defeated the Germans, despite their enemy’s advanced weapons, but also inflicted significant casualties. According to all the conventions of warfare recognised by the peoples of South-West Africa, the logical next step was to enter into negotiations and avoid further bloodshed.

Samuel Maharero could not possibly have realised that his war against the Germans had – in the minds of the Kaiser and the military elite in Berlin – escalated to such a point it was no longer a colonial war in any recognisable sense. By the time of General von Trotha’s appointment, it was clear that nothing but an overwhelming military victory would appease a German public who had been whipped into a frenzy by months of unbridled colonialist propaganda.

In his own accounts of the war, von Trotha says little of Herero attempts to open negotiations. The German Official
History of the campaign, written by the army’s own historians, is equally evasive on the subject. According to surviving German records, some of the main Herero sub-chiefs, including the influential Salatiel Kambazembi, attempted to initiate negotiations in late July. At that time Major Ludwig von Estorff, one of the most experienced and respected officers in the
Schutztruppe
, strongly recommended that von Trotha enter into talks. Von Trotha refused. Discussing the peace feelers of the Herero chiefs in his diary, he dismissed their attempts to negotiate with the phrase ‘fought together, caught together, hanged together’.
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On 4 August 1904 General von Trotha issued his ‘Directives for the Attack on the Hereros’. The German force was to be divided into six detachments. Each would approach from a different direction and encircle the Herero encampment. Given the size of the battlefield, the encirclement would be far from watertight. However, the enemy the Germans were seeking to trap were mainly civilians: women, children and the elderly, together with their slow-moving cattle. Once contained, the Herero would be bombarded with artillery and grenades. When the Herero fighters, who still outnumbered the Germans, attempted to break through the encirclement, they would be forced back by the Maxim guns – capable of firing three hundred rounds per minute. The whole battle would be coordinated by a team of scouts who were to scale the sheer cliffs of the Waterberg. There they would track the movements of the Herero and signal their positions to their comrades below using heliographs.

In the early hours of 10 August 1904, two days shy of seven months since the Herero in Okahandja had risen up, von Trotha emerged from his tent for a final briefing with his most senior officers. They assembled before a large map of the Waterberg, on which the plan of battle had been marked. After the briefing they all posed for a photograph.

The next morning at six o’clock exactly the German guns burst into life. Most of the Herero were asleep in their huts when the first shells and grenades crashed down among them. People were blown apart by shrapnel and their
pontoks
incinerated. Led by their Nama guides, the Germans crept forward to tighten the noose. When the Herero counter-attacked, they were met by the twelve Maxim guns that had been strategically placed around the encirclement. Throughout the day, wave after wave of Herero fighters struggled to break the stranglehold. Those carrying guns formed lines of attack, and when they fell, a new line of fighters would take the rifles of the dead and launch a fresh assault. Behind the fighting men, the women collected the dead and tended to the wounded as best they could.
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At around three o’clock in the afternoon, after nine hours of constant fighting, the Herero finally managed to punch a hole in the German lines. The breakthrough came when Maharero’s men overran a German position on the south-eastern side of the encirclement. Both contemporaries and historians have speculated as to whether von Trotha left the south-eastern flank of his force deliberately weak, in the hope that if the Herero did break through, they would be forced to retreat into the Omaheke Desert.

The German detachment on the south-eastern edge of the great encirclement, commanded by Major der Heyde, was small compared with the units placed at the disposal of the five other commanders, and General von Trotha had been warned of this disparity before the battle. Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow, writing in his memoirs (published posthumously in 1931), was in no doubt that this had been a deliberate strategy. He stated that, ‘In order to be rid of the Hereros sooner, he [von Trotha] suggested that they be driven into the waterless desert with women and children.’ Paul Leutwein, the son of the governor, also claimed that his father ‘foresaw the breakthrough of the Herero and their resulting flight into the sandveld or across the border. He realised that in both cases the entire people would be lost.’
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Perhaps this aspect of von Trotha’s plan – if it was
a deliberate tactic – was a tacit acknowledgement that, despite all the troops and war materials at his disposal, it was still impossible to annihilate fifty thousand people ‘with an instantaneous blow’.

By nightfall on 11 August, the Herero nation, tens of thousands of people, were rushing headlong through the breach in the German lines, funnelled in the direction of the Omaheke. None of this was clear to General von Trotha in his field headquarters 10 miles away: the reports of the battle were confused and contradictory. It was only at dawn on 12 August that the events of the previous day finally became clear. By then most of the Herero had fled into the desert.

To his profound frustration, von Trotha was not able to pursue the Herero immediately on the 12th, due to the utter exhaustion of his men and horses. On the 13th, a small number of German units followed the trail of the Herero into the desert. Captain Maximilian Bayer described the scene that met them in the immediate aftermath of the battle:

Within just two weeks, most of the pursuing German units had exhausted their water supplies and were forced to turn back. Yet even by this point, the desert had taken its toll on the Herero. Adolf Fischer, a German private, wrote the following account of the plight of the Herero as they were pushed ever deeper into the Omaheke:

It was only after the battle of the Waterberg that the full genocidal scope of von Trotha’s plans became clear. Accounts vary as to when the command was given, but at some point, probably before the battle itself, von Trotha issued orders that no Herero prisoners were to be taken. Although a written version of that command has never come to light, Major von Estorff, a firm critic of von Trotha’s policies, recorded in his journal that orders banning the taking of prisoners were in place soon after the Waterberg. Major Stuhlman, who fought at the Waterberg, also recorded having received the order not to take prisoners. In a diary entry made before the battle, he wrote: ‘We had been explicitly told beforehand that what we were dealing with was the extermination of the whole tribe, nothing living was to be spared.’
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It is clear from accounts given later by both German soldiers and African scouts fighting alongside them that from the start of their pursuit, the Germans began systematically to execute men, women and children. But as von Trotha was no doubt aware, the enormous logistical difficulties of pursuing the Herero into the wastelands of the Omaheke meant that his units were incapable of catching and killing the Herero in numbers that he deemed acceptable. On 16 August, and again on the 26th, he issued orders to his troops to cut off waterholes and set up patrols along the perimeter of the Omaheke in order to prevent parties
of Herero from slipping westwards, back into the colony where they could find water and food.

Dehydration was the biggest killer. Herero who had been able to slip cattle through the gap in the German lines quenched their thirst by drinking cows’ blood, leaving a trail of desiccated carcasses in their wake. Those without cattle bore holes, up to 30 feet deep, into the dry riverbeds of the Omaheke. When a little water appeared at the bottom, panic ensued. In the rush to drink, people were crushed, even buried alive, when the walls of these improvised wells collapsed. Katherine Zeraua, a survivor of what was later called ‘the trail of tears’, narrated her experiences to a German missionary: