By the mid-1930s there was a veritable army of race scientists and eugenicists operating across the Reich – literally thousands of well-paid and well-funded doctors, lecturers, research supervisors and teachers, ultimately creating the intellectual and scientific authority for the measures Hitler and Himmler were now beginning to contemplate. But it is important to understand that this generation of doctors and scientists did not see their work as confined to the laboratory or the lecture theatre – they viewed themselves as idealistic pioneers, who were keen to go out into the world and apply the lessons they had learned, from their mentors such as Fischer and Verschuer, to real problems in the field.
An early example of one such ‘problem’ was the existence of 400 mixed-race children in the Rhineland – children who had been born between 1918 and 1921 during the French occupation of that territory, following the Versailles Treaty, the products of relationships between French soldiers (many from their African colonies) and local German women. One of Fischer’s deputies at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Dr Wolfgang Abel (who Fischer had got to know because of Abel’s work examining the skeletons of Nama victims), had carried out a series of ‘racial-biological’ tests on a sample of these children and found them to be ‘physically and mentally deformed’. Abel suggested that action was needed to prevent such people from reproducing in the future. In 1937 Fischer himself was consulted, and the Gestapo set up ‘Special Commission No. 3’, headed by Fischer and Abel. The commission’s task? To identify and then sterlise the 400 Rhineland children, now all teenagers, but to do so in as secret a way as possible.
In the spring of 1937, these children were discreetly taken from their schools and homes to be given a ‘medical examination’. After they had been confirmed as Mischlinge, all were taken to a local hospital where they were forcibly sterilised. With the vast amount of research now conducted on the Holocaust, I am surprised that this appalling episode is so little known. Many people learn about the T4 ‘euthanasia’ programme which started in 1939, and killed more than 70,000 mentally and physically disabled patients, including many children – yet very few people seem to know that the enforced sterilisation of teenagers had begun two years earlier.
The continuities between the Herero and Nama genocides and the Holocaust forty years later are multiple and impossible to ignore. Few who have researched in these fields can fail to see the linkages between these exterminations and the ‘habits of thought’ (to go back to Sven Lindqvist’s phrase) which enabled them to happen. With the understanding about these events now finally beginning to take root in our societies, it will soon not be possible to write or speak about the Holocaust without recognising the connection to the first German genocide in South-West Africa – the first German concentration camps, the first German death camp, the first German medical experiments on prisoners, the first German extermination order.
In the end what inhabits my mind is still the images of hands. The hands of the women in Swakopmund concentration camp, scraping the flesh from the boiled skulls of their dead mothers and fathers and husbands and children, with shards of glass, so that these heads could then be sent to Germany for ‘scientific research’ – some of these skulls still there today, lying in the basements of museums and universities.
The hands of the Owambo workers, chained together, feeling in the hot sands of the desert outside Luderitz for diamonds, and finding shards of bones and skulls instead, the only remaining fragments of the Herero and Nama now almost completely exterminated from this land.
And the hands of the thousands of Herero children, women and men, digging frantically in the Omaheke desert, desperate for water, hands becoming blistered in the furnace heat, digging down deeper than their own bodies, hallucinating with thirst. Hundreds of these holes full of skeletons, left all over the Omaheke …
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And the hands of men in rooms, men writing. The sound of pen on paper. All that is unleashed through words.
The hand of Heinrich Goering signing the first protection treaty at Okahandja – the ink on that piece of paper doing the work of guns and lead.
The hand of Gustav Frenssen writing about Peter Moor’s adventures, sowing seeds of extermination in the minds of children.
The hand of Friedrich Ratzel as he combines the words ‘lebens’ and ‘raum’ to create a concept more lethal than any weapon.
The hand of General von Trotha in the desert clearing at Osombo zo Windimbe drafting his Vernichtungsbefehl – the first written extermination order in history.
The hands of Dove, Rohrbach and Fischer writing their academic papers and books, building their careers on a foundation of hatred for other races.
6
A Coda: The Power of History and the Burning of Books
What had happened in South-West Africa between 1904 and 1908 only became widely known because of a curious combination of circumstances that occurred towards the end of the First World War. A joint British and South African force had landed in South-West Africa in September 1914, and by July 1915 the German governor surrendered. The colony subsequently became known as the British Protectorate of South-West Africa, but was, from that moment on, effectively governed by South Africa, from Pretoria. There was a great degree of continuity, however, with the majority of German institutions and businesses being allowed to stay on. Only the German military were interned as prisoners of war.
One of the first actions of General Botha, the South African military commander who had taken the German surrender, was to order the seizure and translation of all German documents. Significantly, and ominously for them as it turned out, the Germans had kept extremely detailed archives of their rule at the central colonial administration offices in Windhoek. And it was through the process of looking at this mountain of documents that more information about the Herero and Nama genocides began to emerge.
In 1917, with the prospect of victory over Germany in the war now looking more likely, the Allies started to discuss what might happen to the former German colonies. There was a strong belief, certainly among the South Africans and the British, that South-West Africa should never be returned to Germany. It was in this context that the South African government commissioned an official investigative report into the treatment of the Herero and Nama in South-West Africa in the early years of the twentieth century.
This could have made the Report on the Natives of South-West Africa and their Treatment by Germany a simple propaganda job, but it was actually strikingly factual and accurate, which gave it great power. The vast majority of the material used in the report came from Germany’s own documents, and these were so shocking in themselves, there was no need for any exaggeration. The man chosen to co-ordinate the report was Major Thomas O’Reilly, a lawyer by background, who had been working as a magistrate in western Hereroland from 1916 onwards, where he had already come across extensive accounts of the Herero genocide. He spent three months working intensively on the draft report in the autumn and winter of 1917–18, going right back to the first dubious ‘protection treaties’ signed by Heinrich Goering, and up to the genocides and von Lindequist’s governorship.