Rohrbach’s books were just one part of an entire movement in Germany happening in the first fifteen years of the century, together with the creation of the German Colonial School and the Colonial Institute in Hamburg. German corporations were at the forefront of this movement, not just the rail companies we’ve already seen profiting from slave labour, but Deutsche Bank and Krupp Steel started to offer scholarship programmes to students seeking careers in the new colonies. The impact that this cultural zeitgeist had on the formation of Nazi ideology in the early 1920s is incalculable. And though Hitler never saw African colonialism as central to his aims, he certainly wanted to use the lessons learned in Africa, Asia and America from colonial settlement, to create a vast new Lebensraum for German settlers in eastern Europe, involving the enslavement of the native populations. The British Empire was a continual inspiration for Hitler in this regard. As he put it:
It should be possible for us to control this region to the East with two hundred and fifty thousand men plus a cadre of good administrators. Let’s learn from the English, who, with two hundred and fifty thousand men in all, including fifty thousand soldiers, govern four hundred million Indians. This space in Russia must always be dominated by Germans.fn13
What India was for England, the territories of Russia will be for us. If only I could make the German people understand what this space means for our future!
And, exactly as Rohrbach had argued, Hitler stated in 1942 that the Russians ‘have but one justification for existence – to be used by us economically’. Hermann Goering, the son of the first governor of South-West Africa (then in charge of the megalomaniacal ‘Resettlement Plan’ involving the displacement of millions of people, and their replacement by millions more German settlers), enthusiastically predicted famine for millions of Soviet inhabitants in the same year, saying that ‘it is as well that it should be so for certain nations must be decimated’. And, after all, who remembered the Herero or the Nama now? Who remembered the original indigenous populations? As Hitler had said: ‘I don’t see why a German who eats a piece of bread should torment himself with the idea that the soil that produces this bread has been won by the sword. When we eat wheat from Canada, we don’t think about the despoiled Indians.’
*
Eugen Fischer studied medicine, gaining his first degree in 1898, and then a further degree, in anatomy and anthropology, two years later at the University of Freiburg. Like many young medics at that time Fischer became mesmerised by the growing pseudo-science of eugenics, and specifically the theories of ‘racial degeneration’ propounded by influential figures such as Felix von Luschan, then director of the Berlin Museum of Ethnology. Fischer first became known for publishing a study on the skull width of Papuans in 1906, which won an international award. Next he wanted to find a mixed-race community somewhere in the world where he could pursue research into ‘the bastardisation of the races’. In 1907 he came across a booklet written by a German officer who’d served under von Trotha in South-West Africa, called The Nation of the Bastards – about one of the twelve Nama tribes, the Basters, a mixed-race community of 2,000 people gathered around the town of Rehoboth, just south of Windhoek. They had lived there for over fifty years, and had a reputation for being close-knit, but if the women did marry outside their own community, it was usually to white men. Unlike the majority of the Nama tribes, the Basters spoke only Afrikaans, and had adopted many of the cultural traits of the Boers in South Africa; they were also known for their strong Christianity and for their conservative values.
Fischer travelled to Rehoboth in 1908 and spent two months conducting ‘field research’ – primarily carrying out anatomical measurements. The Basters were not impressed by his approach, an elder apparently telling him that they were ‘not savages’ and asking him why he didn’t carry out similar examinations on the white residents of the town. Nevertheless, he took hundreds of photographs, recorded all the ‘data’ he’d gathered, and returned to Germany, where in 1913 he published his book, Die Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardierungsproblem beim Menschen (‘The Rehoboth Bastards and the Bastardisation Problem in Man’), which claimed to show the process of ‘racial degeneration’ in successive generations of Basters – i.e. that racial features and characteristics of their Nama ancestors gradually became dominant over those features inherited from their white ancestry. Shockingly, not only was this work a huge success in 1913, but it continued to be in print until 1961.
Fischer’s work contributed to the growing discussion in Germany before the First World War about Rassenhygiene (race hygiene) and the need to save ‘our wonderful German nation’, as Fischer put it, by preserving the Aryan heritage – ideas which were to become central to Nazism in the next generation. In 1921, Fischer, now director of the Anatomical Institute in Freiburg, published, together with Erwin Baur and Fritz Lens, Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene, which was not only very warmly received in Germany, but was soon translated into English too. This book argued that to stop the ‘polluting’ effect of racial degeneration a programme of selective breeding was needed to ‘purify’ the Aryan race. Just as Hitler digested Ratzel’s theory of Lebensraum when imprisoned at Landsberg in 1924, we also know he was given a copy of Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene at this time, which impressed him greatly. Indeed, many of the ideas from this work were to reappear the following year, though in Hitler’s words now, in Mein Kampf.
Throughout the 1920s, the supposed ‘science’ of eugenics became more and more influential, not just in Germany, but also throughout Europe and America; indeed, in some US states eugenics laws were actually passed, an advent welcomed by Hitler among others. In 1927 Fischer was promoted, together with Fritz Lens, to become a director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics in Berlin, Germany’s most important race-science institution.fn14 When the Nazis took power in 1933, Fischer was given an additional position as rector of Berlin University, where he used his inaugural address to declare his support for Hitler. He also published a paper positing that racial mixing between Aryan Germans and Jews was damaging the German race, just as Nama blood had polluted the white ancestors of the Basters, and arguing that the time was now right for laws to be passed preventing such racial mixing.
In 1935, Dr Wilhelm Stuckartfn15 and legal colleagues, acting on Hitler’s wishes and Fischer’s suggestions, wrote the infamous Nuremberg Race Laws (consisting of the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour). These laws forbade Jews, and all other non-Aryan racial groups such as ‘Negroes’ and Gypsies, from marrying or having sexual relationships with German citizens. Fischer’s work on race science is specifically referred to in these laws, providing a spurious authority to pure racist ideology. The term Mischlinge (of mixed race) recurs throughout this legislation, and much of the Wannsee Conference was spent in discussion of exactly how the Mischlinge question – the mixed-race German Jews – should be resolved in the ‘Final Solution’.
I had always assumed this term was a Nazi coinage, developed in the process of the Nuremberg Laws being drafted, but this is not the case – its origins go back much further, to 1906 in fact, to German South-West Africa. It was here that von Lindequist first passed laws banning intermarriage between German colonists and native peoples, it was here the term Mischlinge was used for the first time. This term and laws preventing mixed marriages were then adopted by other German colonies, in East Africa and German Togo in 1906 and 1908 respectively, making the subsequent work of the Nuremberg Laws much simpler for those drafting the legislation, as Olusoga and Erichsen note: ‘The Mischlinge concept provided the lawyers and civil servants with both a conceptual framework and quasi-legal terminology, allowing them to formulate a system by which Germany’s ancient Jewish community, with its deep and complex roots, could be classified, isolated and ultimately extracted.’2