The small minority of prisoners who are selected as fit for work (the German term used was Arbeitsfahige) are soon worked to death. By October 1906, 300 slave labourers are charged with constructing a new quay in Luderitz harbour. These men and women are forced to haul large boulders across the island by hand, and then pull them into the freezing waters of the bay. By Christmas 1906, Richard Müller, the engineer supervising the harbour project, complains in a report to his superiors that instead of the 1,600 Nama prisoners he’d been promised for his labour force, he now has only 30–40, and that 17 prisoners have died in a single night. He has no concern for their survival, or lack of it, he simply wants to communicate that ‘if measures are not actively taken to acquire (new) labourers, I fear the work will not be completed’. By February 1907 the harbour project is abandoned because 70 per cent of the Nama on Shark Island are now dead.
When I first learned about the Jewish Holocaust as a teenager I remember the shock of total disbelief that came with the knowledge that the Nazis established ‘extermination camps’ (Vernichtungslager) – four of them constructed between 1941 and 1942 – at Chelmno, Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor.fn11 I’ve grown to feel that the word ‘camp’ is inaccurate with regard to these four sites, as it implies some kind of temporary habitation, as in ‘concentration camp’, ‘labour camp’, ‘work camp’ – but, of course, almost nobody survived at these places, apart from the SS officers, guards and those working in the Sonderkommando. Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Majdanek, Dachau, Belsen – all of these were sites of mass murder on an unimaginable scale, but there were survivors who could be numbered in their hundreds, even thousands in the case of Auschwitz. At the extermination camps almost nobody survived. They existed only for the killing of those who arrived there.
And now I think of those 2,000 Nama men, women and children arriving at Shark Island on 9 September 1906, and the 1,000 Herero prisoners already there. I think about that autumn and winter, and the non-existent shelter and the almost total lack of food and the slave labour in the harbour, and the inevitable daily deaths, hundreds each month. And I think about the fact that the German authorities were completely aware of what they were doing, and intentionally allowed it to continue – indeed, the German garrison in Luderitz didn’t call it Shark Island but ‘Death Island’, because death was the only function of the place. And I wonder, yet again, about the history that all of us have been taught. The way that some genocides are visible to us, and others are not. I wonder what percentage of people in our societies knows the name ‘Auschwitz’. I would guess a large majority. I wonder how many people have ever heard the name ‘Shark Island’. I would guess less than 0.1 per cent – no, not even that, perhaps only a few people in every million. Yet Olusoga and Erichsen, rightly, stress the historical significance of this place:
The camp’s main focus from September 1906 onwards was the extermination of Nama prisoners. Nama deaths were the ‘product’ of the Shark Island camp; forced labour was merely one of the means by which those deaths were brought about. Shark Island was a death camp, perhaps the world’s first.
Another remarkable link between German colonialism in South-West Africa and Nazism in occupied Europe concerns the way that concentration-camp prisoners were experimented upon, their bodies used, alive and dead, as a means of furthering medical science. Dr Bofinger, the camp doctor at Shark Island and Luderitz concentration camp, conducted medical trials on prisoners, injecting them with arsenic and opium, among other substances, to see the effects of these substances on their bodies after death. Unsurprisingly, Bofinger’s ‘hospital’ on Shark Island was feared, a missionary noting that ‘[not] even a single person recovered in the Lazarett [field hospital]’.
There was also a thriving trade in body parts of dead prisoners, which were shipped back to universities and museums in Germany. In the Swakopmund concentration camp, in 1905, women prisoners were forced to boil the severed heads of their dead relatives and friends, and then scrape the remaining flesh and sinews off the skulls, which were then packed into crates by German soldiers and despatched to Germany. There were even photographs of this, made into postcards by the Germans, to be sent home; they were proud of what they were doing. By 1906, the process had become more clinical, with the bodies of seventeen recently dead Nama prisoners at Shark Island first being decapitated by Dr Bofinger, who then removed and weighed each of the brains. The heads were placed in alcohol for preservation, then sealed in tins and finally sent to the Institute of Pathology at Berlin University. Here they were used by ‘race scientists’ to show supposed similarities between the Nama and the ape – just as, forty years later, Dr Mengele would send back body parts, including heads and eyes, from victims of his supposed ‘medical’ experiments at Auschwitz to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin to further the insane cause of racial science.
By the time Shark Island was finally closed in April 1907, a German military officer estimated that 1,900 Nama had died on the island. It is thought a similar number of Herero died there as well, before the Germans began to document their atrocities. And we know that 1,359 more died at the Luderitz concentration camp run by Firma Lenz, the base for that company’s building of the Luderitz–Aus railway with slave labour. Well over 4,000 dead Nama and Herero between 1906 and 1907 at Shark Island and the concentration camps nearby, only a stone’s throw from the town of Luderitz, population 1,000, where the settlers and traders went about their business seemingly quite unaffected by the barbaric happenings just beyond their settlement’s walls.
In the German colonial census of 1908, it was recorded that 16,363 Herero remained in South-West Africa, out of a pre-war population of around 80,000. Almost 80 per cent of the Herero people had ‘disappeared’ – the vast majority killed by German guns, starvation in the desert and slave labour in the concentration camps. Only a fraction of the Herero had survived by escaping from the colony. A similar census, from 1911, found that 9,781 Nama were still living in South-West Africa – this from a pre-war figure of 20,000, meaning that just over half of the Nama had been killed in similar circumstances. Some Nama communities, however, had been virtually eliminated – from the Witbooi clan almost nobody was still living, and less than a hundred of the Bethanie Nama survived.
This genocide ushered in what became known in Germany as the era of ‘settler paradise’ – ‘our new Germany on African soil’, as one settler breathlessly described it. And if any Herero or Nama survivors had thoughts about attempting to hold on to their own soil, Kaiser Wilhelm formally expropriated all Herero land in December 1905, and virtually all Nama land in May 1907. The following year saw another promising development for the colonists: in 1908 huge deposits of diamonds were found close to the surface near Luderitz, triggering an extraordinary ‘diamond rush’ in 1908 and 1909. Diamond companies used more slave labour to prospect for the diamonds, this time using workers of the Owambo people from the north of the colony. Again, the conditions were appalling; again, many slave labourers died. They would be chained together, and made to crawl across the desert on all fours, hands reaching in the burning sand for the elusive crystals. Outside Luderitz, where the Germans had created mass shallow graves for the dead of Shark Island and the other concentration camps, these Owambo workers must often have found skulls and bones, and other traces of the dead in the desert as they worked.