Kaiser's Holocaust (52 page)

Labour camps and death camps were a policy of last resort for the Nazis, just as concentration camps had been for the British in South Africa and the Kaiser’s army in South-West Africa. General von Trotha had sought to annihilate the Herero in the great encirclement at the Waterberg or – when this proved impractical – to push them into the Omaheke. He had not envisaged that they would be slowly worked and starved to death by the civilian authorities and private companies in concentration camps.

In 1942, the Nazis’ war in the East ran into the same crisis and contradictions that had halted von Trotha’s war in South-West Africa in 1905. The desire to exterminate or expel their racial enemies ran counter to a growing and desperate need for labour and concerns for the well-being of the fighting men. These contradictions were never fully solved, but as in South-West Africa, one solution was the creation of forced labour camps in which labour became a means of liquidation. The Nazis termed this ‘extermination through labour’. The direct impact that the labour shortage had on treatment of the peoples of the Nazi East was demonstrated most dramatically by the Nazis’ attitudes towards Soviet prisoners of war. During the terrible winter of 1941–2, around 2.2 million Soviet soldiers were starved, frozen and beaten to death in vast open-air pens. Six hundred thousand were simply shot and a small number gassed in the first mobile
gassing vans. This was the first Nazi genocide.
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Although a further 1.3 million Soviets died in German captivity between the end of February 1942 and the end of the war, the faltering war economy dictated that the prisoners of war be exploited as slave labour rather than simply liquidated, preventing a repetition of the mass extermination seen during the first winter of the war.

The Nazis had begun to exploit the labour of their racial and political enemies in concentration camps (
Konzentrationslager
) even before the war. Yet in 1941 the camps housed fewer than 1 million prisoners. By 1945 the system had evolved into a vast network of facilities of various types and had exterminated 11 million people, enslaving another 6 million. This was realised through an incessant and furious process of invention and radicalisation. Like the colonial authorities of German South-West Africa, who adapted the original concentration camp concept inherited from the British and the Spanish, the Nazis added their own modifications. Count von Stillfried’s ‘confined areas’ and regime of forced labour were replicated in the Nazi East, as was the practice of selecting the work-able from the work-unable. The scale was vastly different but the principles broadly the same.

Yet even on Shark Island, the worst of the South-West African camps, there had been a half-hearted attempt to harness the labour of the prisoners. Shark Island can be considered a death camp in that extermination of the prisoners clearly took precedence over the work they were ostensibly deployed to carry out. The equanimity with which the civilian colonial authorities accepted the failure of the infrastructure projects on which the Nama worked demonstrated that such works were of secondary importance and the extermination of the prisoners the primary function of the camp. The critical Nazi refinement of the death camp concept was to create camps in which any pretence at forced labour was abandoned. Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdenek, Belzek and Chelmno differed from Shark Island, and from the other Nazi camps, in that they were simply factories for killing. There the regime made no effort to
exploit the labour of the vast majority of those who passed through their gates. Indeed, the Final Solution absorbed men and resources, and ran counter to military pragmatism. These were camps with no alibi, no cover story and no ‘product’, other than liquidation.

During World War II, both German scholars and members of the Nazi elite came to recognise that the war in the East, and the regime’s murderous treatment of its racial enemies, were redolent of the bloodier episodes in colonial history. Yet during the Nuremberg Trials in 1946 and 1947, the International Military Tribunal and the governments it represented avoided making similar connections. The memory of the German genocides committed in South-West Africa, so important at Versailles in 1919, were overlooked at Nuremberg a generation later. This is partly explained by ‘colonial amnesia’ – Europe’s propensity for ignoring or forgetting the colonial past. However, in 1945, with the greater part of Asia and almost all of Africa still under colonial rule, the victorious and liberated powers of Europe had more immediate reasons for wanting to close their eyes to the darker aspects of colonial history.

Throughout the war, the British had put millions of her colonial subjects into uniform and called on them to fight Fascism. Yet their status as colonial subjects, without a political voice and on the wrong side of the colour-bar, was not widely regarded as being at odds with the propaganda of a war against Nazism. The hypocrisy of the Western democracies, who condemned the racism of the Nazis while ruling over 600 million colonial subjects, was ridiculed by socialists of various shades. Some characterised the war between the Western democracies and Germany as a clash between a group of imperialist powers and a would-be imperialist power.

Although wartime Allied propagandists had rightly condemned the Nazi East as a ‘slave empire’, post-war governments maintained that the horrific depths to which Nazi imperialism had
sunk had no bearing on the future of their own empires or on the general principle of colonialism. But the experiences of the war forced post-war advocates of empire to denounce the model of colonialism that had emerged from the Social Darwinian revolution in the late nineteenth century. When Germany had drawn the line between ‘superior’ and ‘lower’ races across the continent of Europe itself, and condemned the Jews as a parasitic race and the Slavs as a ‘colonial people’, a nexus of a biological anti-Semitism,
Rassenkrieg
and
Lebensraum
had been unleashed. Only then had the general populations of the colonial powers who confronted Hitler been able to see at close quarters what the colonial ‘conquest of the world’ could mean, and where the clinical logic of biological racism could lead. That the victims of Nazi imperialism were white Europeans helped overcome the barrier of racism and made the realisation easier.

Rather than reject the colonial project in the wake of Nazism, the Western colonial powers evoked the alternative vision of colonialism: the nineteenth-century notion of the ‘civilising mission’. They used it to claim that their systems were distinct from Nazi imperialism and therefore fit to continue in the twentieth century, perhaps beyond. The British in particular spoke of their empire as ‘communities’ or ‘families’ of nations.
1
Pointing to the successes in their territories (where they could be found), colonialists across Europe sought both to placate indigenous independence movements, and to demonstrate to the world and the multi-ethnic United Nations that the violence and genocidal racism of the Nazi colonial experiment was not an innate feature of all imperial ventures.

The cold facts of 1945 were that the British were almost bankrupted by the war and needed the foreign exchange from their colonial produce to support a faltering currency. The French, Belgians and Dutch were seeking to re-establish themselves as powers on the international stage, unable to accept their status as geopolitical minnows in a world of Super Powers. At the very moment the European powers needed their empires financially and geopolitically, they claimed more vociferously than ever that
colonialism was motivated not by self-interest but by Christian paternalism.

As in the lead-up to the Paris Peace Conference and the Versailles Treaty, the Americans had, at first, seen things differently. Attracted to the principle of international supervision of post-war dependent territories, they had gone so far as to predict that the war would see the age of empire brought to an end. However, by 1945 America’s traditional antipathy towards European empire-building, and British expansionism in particular, was drowned out by deeper fears. The slow dawning of the Cold War convinced Truman’s administration that the European empires were needed as a balance against the power of Stalin’s USSR. When France, Belgium and the Netherlands – all of whom had been occupied by the
Wehrmacht
only months earlier – returned to their colonies in Asia and Africa and imposed their own occupation on the local populations, they encountered little resistance from across the Atlantic.

As the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg were being condemned as the masters of a ‘slave empire’, a new age of European colonialism in Africa and Asia was stuttering into life. Those who stood in its way were the colonial subjects themselves, who had dared to imagine that the defeat of Nazism might herald the new era of racial equality and self-determination that wartime propaganda had alluded to.

In the context of the post-war renewal of European colonialism, the history of exterminatory wars and slavery in Africa and Asia was an unwelcome intrusion that risked demonstrating how Western colonialism had, in the past, been capable of atrocities similar in character (if rarely in scale) to those so recently seen in Europe. But if colonial history was brushed under the carpet, the genocides committed by Germany in South-West Africa had, by 1945, been comprehensively buried.

In 1919, South Africa had dramatically revealed to the world the atrocities carried out in German South-West Africa. Yet in the
years after Versailles, the same nation had quietly and efficiently entombed the history they had gone to such efforts to unearth. Despite all their condemnations of German colonialism, the South African administrators of the Mandate of South-West Africa had established a white settler society in the colony, which was in most respects indistinguishable from that which Germany had spent three decades struggling to build. In 1921 the Herero and Nama lands that had been confiscated by Kaiser Wilhelm II were incorporated into the ‘Crown Lands of South-West Africa’. Eight thousand square miles of territory were set aside for white settlers who were encouraged to migrate north from South Africa. The same year, the policy of native reserves begun by the Germans in 1903 was revived. From a total of 57 million hectares, 2 million were set aside for the ‘natives’, who made up 90 percent of the colonial population.
2
With the best farmland earmarked for whites, the native reserves were situated on unproductive, marginal land. One reserve, at Aminuis in the Omaheke Desert, in which thousands of Herero were made to settle, was described as being ‘deadly for cattle’, by the South African’s own Reserves Superintendent.
3

After the last Nama uprising had been crushed and the will of the Herero to resist dampened by an intimidatory campaign of aerial bombardment, they, along with the other ‘native’ tribes, were bound to the white economy by a taxation system carefully designed to force them to seek work on white-owned farms for part of the year. In 1927, the South Africans completed the disempowerment of the black population by suppressing their history.

At the core of South African policy in South-West Africa was the ambition to erase the nationalism and jingoism of the war years, and instil in the white population a sense of unity that placed racial consciousness above nationalism and language. Of the twenty thousand whites resident in the Mandate of South-West Africa in 1921, almost eight thousand were Germans who had remained in the colony after 1918. Over the course of the early 1920s, the South African administration became increasingly aware that the history contained in the Blue Book of 1919
was a significant obstacle to the unity of the white population. The leaders of the German settler community were open in their desire to see the Blue Book obscured, or perhaps officially repudiated as a ‘war pamphlet’.
4
Chief among their complaints was that Major O’Reilly’s report had been based, in part, on the testimonies of ‘uneducated blacks’.

In July 1926 August Stauch, a German settler respected as the overseer who had identified the first diamonds found outside Lüderitz, put forward a proposal to the newly elected Legislative Assembly, calling for the destruction of all copies of the Blue Book. In support of Stauch, the
Windhoek Advertiser
assured its readers that ‘The Germans were ready and anxious to cooperate in the building up of South West Africa … [but] could not do so fully until the stigma imposed by the publication of the Bluebook in question had been removed from their name.’ Further encouragement for the proposal came from D.W. Ballot, leader of the ruling Union party, who reminded his fellow settlers that ‘Few civilized races could look back over their colonial history without regrets in regard to some of the incidents that have darkened their past.’
5

In 1927, all copies of the Blue Book were recalled from public libraries and government offices and burned. Copies held in British colonies abroad were transferred to the Foreign Office and the testimonies that had shocked delegates at Versailles were purged from the Official History.
6
In a eulogy to the Blue Book, the editor of the
Windhoek Advertiser
, J. D. L. Burke, concluded that its destruction would allow the white nations in South-West Africa to ‘go forward together unhampered by the suspicion and rancour of the past’.
7
The burning of the Blue Book was the moment the South African authorities, with the acquiescence of the British, took over the process of historical fabrication and distortion begun by the German authorities two decades earlier.

By the end of World War II, the white population of the Mandate of South-West Africa had reached almost thirty
thousand. United and racially privileged, this tiny minority ruled over a black African population of well over a quarter of a million.

In January 1946, Britain placed the former German colonies of Togoland, the Cameroons and Tanganyika, which had been awarded to her as mandates by the League of Nations, under the trusteeship of United Nations. France, Belgium, Australia and New Zealand all pledged to do the same with their mandates. But Pretoria refused to loosen her grip on South-West Africa. Two years later, elections brought the National Party to power in South Africa and their government immediately set about expanding existing laws into the Apartheid system. After a farcical sham referendum, South Africa informed the United Nations in 1949 that she would continue to rule South-West Africa as a mandate. The territory was effectively incorporated into South Africa. As independence movements grew in strength across the continent, South Africa slipped into her age of isolation, dragging South-West Africa with her. The ‘wind of change’, like the early Portuguese explorers, were unable to penetrate the Namib or reach the people of the southwestern interior.