Kaiser's Holocaust (26 page)

The Herero recruited by private individuals as farmhands or servants were arguably more fortunate than those hired out to private companies. Each morning, the overseers employed by various German firms assembled thousands of Herero and marched them from the camps, through the streets or across deserts, to public construction sites. Women, men and sometimes children were forced to build roads, construct buildings, lay rails or stack heavy bags of food or ammunition. In Swakopmund, Herero women were formed into teams of eight and – in lieu of oxen or horses – made to pull the wagons on the narrow-gauge railway.

As surviving photographs show, at Swakopmund, the Woermann Shipping Line employed so many concentration-camp prisoners that they were permitted to open their own ‘enclosure’. In this private concentration camp, the prisoners – described at times as ‘stock’ or ‘head’, as if they were cattle – lived in conditions almost identical to those in the main military camps, although there seems to have been a slightly better supply of pots to cook with.

In an affidavit submitted to the Governor of the British Cape Colony in August 1906, three coloured workers from Cape Town, who had the previous year passed through Swakopmund, described the conditions under which the female prisoners were made to labour in an indeterminant Swakopmund camp:

It is hard to determine the number of lives lost in the camps. The only camp that kept records of mortality in 1905 was the Swakopmund camp. According to their statistics approximately 40 percent of the prisoners in Swakopmund died during their first four months of captivity, and any prisoner who entered the camp was likely to be dead within ten months. And this was almost certainly an underestimation of the true death rate at Swakopmund.

A photograph smuggled out of the camp – probably in mid-1905 – shows the withered body of a young Herero boy. It is not clear if he is dead or alive. Each rib is visible and around his waist is a tightly bound leather strap worn by most prisoners, possibly to subdue the pain of hunger. Otherwise, he is naked, clutching in his right hand his only possession – a hessian sack.

It has been suggested that the extremely high mortality rates in the camps were the result of accidental neglect, disorganisation within the army or simply the ignorance of those tasked with administering the camp system.
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However, a report written by Dr Fuchs – the civilian District Commissioner of Swakopmund – demonstrates that both the colonial administration in Windhoek and the most senior officials in the Colonial Department in
Berlin were fully aware of what took place in the camps, and chose not to act.
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In early 1905, two months after the opening of the camps, the missionary Heinrich Vedder brought the death rates in Swakopmund and the other concentration camps to the attention of his superiors at the Rhenish Mission’s headquarters in the German town of Wupperthal. At a meeting with the Colonial Department in Berlin, the missionaries confronted officials with Vedder’s reports. In response, a muted and carefully worded order for the immediate drafting of a report into conditions in the Swakopmund camp was issued by the Colonial Department. The order was sent initially to the Deputy Governor of South-West Africa, Hans Tecklenburg, who passed it on to District Commissioner Fuchs.

Dr Fuchs was given full access to the camp, and his report, although hastily written, was damning in its conclusions. According to Fuchs’s calculations, around 10 percent of the entire population of the Swakopmund camp had died in the last two weeks of May 1905.
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In his opinion, corroborated by the local government doctor, the Herero in the Swakopmund camp were dying at an alarming rate due to ‘inadequate facilities’. The poor conditions were made worse by the ‘raw, uncommon ocean climes and the weakened state in which they [the prisoners] arrived’.
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Dr Fuchs also compared the death rates of the prisoners in the concentration camp with that of a number of Damara and Owambo migrant labourers living in Swakopmund at the time and working ‘in the service of the local government’. Fuchs informed his superiors that not one of them had died since he had taken command on 15 September 1903. In fact, among all groups in Swakopmund, German and African, civilian and military, and even those held in the local prison, mortality rates had remained ‘constant’.

In conclusion, Dr Fuchs stated that in order to reduce the mortality rate, ‘It is necessary to provide [the prisoners] with accommodation that is sheltered from the wind, properly ventilated
rooms, warm clothes (coats, trousers, blankets, shoes) and some variation in the food (rice, flour and, where possible, also some meat, onions or lard) as well as medical attention’.
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Fuchs’s report was intended to be secret. Copies were sent only to Hans Tecklenburg in Windhoek, Oskar Stuebel, Director of the Colonial Department in Berlin, General von Trotha and Colonel Dame, the head of the
Etappenkommando
. In response, von Trotha, Tecklenburg and Dame all argued that despite the horrendous death rate, the flow of Herero prisoners to Swakopmund and the other coastal camps at Lüderitz had to continue in order to meet the pressing need for labour. Colonel Dame noted that while it might be unfortunate that women prisoners were made to work at the Swakopmund and Lüderitz camps, the need for labour was so acute that ‘there is no alternative’.
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Oskar Stuebel accepted Fuchs’s claim that better food might improve conditions at Swakopmund, but then proceeded to denounce the rationale behind Fuchs’s report. Not only did he fail to implement Fuchs’s recommendations for better conditions, he rejected his suggestion that prisoners who were already sick should be sent inland, away from the freezing conditions at the coast.

There is even evidence that – at least in the mind of Deputy Governor Tecklenburg – the camps were intended to weed out the weak and leave only the stronger Herero. In a letter written to the Colonial Department in June 1905, Tecklenburg argued that the high death rates were in Germany’s long-term interests. The concentration camps would leave the Herero culturally broken and decimated. Any Herero who survived the hardships would become the slaves of the German colonisers and they would necessarily be the strongest and fittest. He noted that,

Wilhelm Eich, the Rhenish Missionary in Okahandja, where 1,500 Herero had been divided between three small concentration camps, claimed on 19 June 1905 that ‘The overseer of Camp I [the military camp] told me recently that he was under orders only to seek out the strong for His Majesty [Wilhelm II].’
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The most damning evidence suggesting that the mass deaths of prisoners in the concentration camps was known of and approved by the German authorities is found in the National Archives of Namibia. In the vaults of the archives is a
Totenregister
– a death register – for the Swakopmund camp.
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It records the deaths of some of the thousands of Herero prisoners who perished in between January 1905 and 1908. Similar
Totenregister
may have existed for the other camps but have since been lost, or were deliberately destroyed.

The pages of the Swakopmund
Totenregister
are divided into columns in which the military clerk or camp officer entered the names, genders and ages of deceased prisoners. However, officiating clerks had no need to enter details in the column indicating the ‘cause of death’. That came pre-printed – ‘death through exhaustion, bronchitis, heart disease or scurvy’.