3 I recently found an uncanny echo of Luderitz’s comments in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: ‘To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.’
4 With this wording Vogelsang tricked Fredericks and the Nama into actually relinquishing land rights one hundred miles in from the coast – because one ‘geographical mile’ supposedly equalled five standard miles.
5 Today we read this as a kind of Hitler Youth caricature of history, yet it was hugely popular in Germany; indeed it was one of the biggest-selling children’s books in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century.
6 Angelo Golinelli, the official in charge of South-West Africa in the Colonial Department in Berlin, wrote that railways in the colonies ‘are built as a prelude to subjugation and pacification’, (from The Kaiser’s Holocaust, by David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen).
7 A phrase which anticipates the lawyers and civil servants of the Wannsee Conference, and Heydrich’s emphasis on clearing ‘the German living space by legal means’ (regardless of the wider genocidal intent).
8 It was only through von Epp’s organisation that Hitler met many of those who were later to become the core of the Nazi Party, Ernst Röhm and Heinrich Himmler among them. It was also von Epp’s old colonial connections that enabled Hitler to procure thousands of surplus South-West African soldiers’ uniforms, desert brown in colour – later giving the name to Hitler’s infamous Nazi street fighters, the ‘Brownshirts’. Perhaps most critically, it was von Epp who in 1920 organised an illegal loan of 60,000 marks which enabled Hitler and his supporters to buy a Munich newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, which was soon to become the key media mouthpiece for the Nazis.
9 It is estimated that out of the 50,000 Herero who were gathered at Waterberg in July 1904, fewer than 1,000 Herero (including Samuel Maharero) managed to reach Bechuanaland.
10 Arthur Koppel was a Berlin-based train and engineering company, originally part of Orenstein & Koppel, founded in 1876. In 1885 the company splits, with Orenstein & Koppel focussing on the German market and Arthur Koppel AG taking the overseas market.
11 Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek were partly extermination camps, but they were also work camps. Not everyone who was sent there was killed immediately, and there were complexes of huts where the prisoners were housed.
12 From Stalin’s War: Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives by Alan Bullock, chapter 17.
13 Both quotations from Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944, introduced by Hugh Trevor-Roper (the first from 27 July 1941; the second from 9–11 August 1941).
14 A third director was Otmar von Verschuer. One of von Verschuer’s most promising students and protégés was later to establish an applied research institute of his own in 1943 at Auschwitz-Birkenau – Dr Josef Mengele. Indeed, the SS links with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute were to become extremely significant over the next fifteen years, with many of the SS doctors attending courses there.
15 See Book One, Chapter Thirteen: ‘The Doctors of Wannsee Meet in a Villa by the Lake’.
6 A Coda: The Power of History and the Burning of Books
1 Accessible online at Florida University website: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00072665/00001.
7 A Question from Günter Grass
1 Interview with Jonathan Steele, Guardian, 8 March 2003.
2 The raising of the flag to claim foreign lands is not only a British phenomenon here: in the book on Columbus, there’s an almost identical picture of the landing on San Salvador, and Columbus with the flag: ‘After giving thanks to God, he took possession of the island in the name of the King and Queen of Spain.’
3 ‘Empire shaped the world. There is an abyss at the heart of dishonest history textbooks’, Observer, 30 October 2016.
4 Jardine Matheson is still booming today (incorporated in Bermuda), with revenue up 19 per cent in the first six months of 2018, to $44.35 billion.
8 Crow-hunting in Tasmania
1 These four accounts are taken from The Aboriginal Tasmanians by Lyndall Ryan, The Tasmanians by Robert Travers, Friendly Mission edited by N.J.B. Plomley and The Last of the Tasmanians by David Davies.
2 Both this quote and the one that follows it are taken from The Aboriginals of Tasmania by H. Ling Roth.
3 From Australia and New Zealand by Antony Trollope. The Maori population in New Zealand had fallen from 240,000 to just 40,000 at the end of the nineteenth century, and the British had ensured the Maori share of land owned on North Island was reduced from 11 million hectares to less than 3 million.
4 For more information please see chapter notes.
9 The British Famine: ‘Slaughters Done in Ireland by Mere Official Red Tape’
1 I hesitate to use the word ‘migration’ here, because this might give an impression of a relatively orderly process of people moving to another country, when in reality, there were extremely high rates of mortality on what became known as the ‘coffin ships’. To give just a single example, between 15 May and 17 June 1847, over 2,000 Irish emigrants died at the quarantine station of Grosse Île near Quebec. By the end of the year, 20,000 immigrants to Canada had died, a mortality rate of 30 per cent of the Irish who had made the journey to Canada. (Details from ‘Erasures’ by Colm Tóibín, London Review of Books, July 1998.)
2 Why Ireland Starved: A Quantative and Analytical History of the Irish Economy, 1800–1850 by Joel Mokyr. It should also be noted that it was Mokyr’s research which first established that a million people had died in the Famine (up to this point Irish historians had only estimated the figure at around half a million). Mokyr’s work also raised the question that there were potentially an additional 400,000 ‘averted births’, i.e. births that didn’t happen due to hunger-induced amenorrhoea (absence of menstruation) and other illnesses.
3 From ‘Starvation and Political Economy: Famines, Entitlement and Alienation’, a paper Sen delivered at New York University’s conference on Famine and World Hunger, 1995.
4 From Ireland Before and After the Famine by Cormac O’Grada.
5 From ‘A Letter to Rt Hon. Chichester Fortescue MP on the State of Ireland’, 1868.
6 Quoted in Postcolonial Borderlands: Orality and Irish Traveller Writing by Christine Walsh.
7 Quoted in ‘Historians and the Famine: a Beleaguered Species’, Irish Historical Studies Vol. 30 (1997).
8 O’Grada’s comments are taken from Ireland Before and After the Famine: Explorations in Economic History, 1800–1925.
9 From A Death-Dealing Famine: The Great Hunger in Ireland by Christine Kinealy.