european history quarterly 

From Africa to Auschwitz: How German South

West Africa Incubated Ideas and Methods
Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in
Eastern Europe
Benjamin Madley
Yale University, USA

The German terms Lebensraum and Konzentrationslager, both widely known

because of their use by the Nazis, were not coined by the Hitler regime. They were
minted years earlier in reference to German South West Africa, now Namibia,
during the first decade of the twentieth century, when Germans colonized the land
and committed genocide against the local Herero and Nama peoples. Later use of
these borrowed words suggests an important question: did Wilhelmine coloniza-
tion and genocide in Namibia influence Nazi plans to conquer and settle Eastern
Europe, enslave and murder millions of Slavs and exterminate Gypsies and Jews?
In 1951, Hannah Arendt postulated that European imperialism played a crucial
role in the development of totalitarianism and associated genocides.1 Yet, she
stopped short of tracing how colonialism influenced Nazi leaders and their
policies. Today, the colonial antecedents Arendt mentioned are finally receiving
attention. Sven Lindquist and Enzo Traverso are pioneers in the field and as Dirk
Moses has noted, ‘historians like Jürgen Zimmerer are on the case’.2 Indeed, in his
Colonialism and the Holocaust, Zimmerer claimed that, ‘colonialism provided
important precedents’ for Nazi ‘genocidal thinking’.3 Moreover, he argued that,
‘the war waged by German imperial troops against the Herero and Nama . . .
constitutes an important connection between colonial genocide and the crimes of
the Nazis’.4 Isabel Hull has also noted similarities between German South West
African and Nazi annihilationist policies.5 This essay builds on previous scholar-
ship to establish the Second Reich experience in German South West Africa as a
crucial precursor to Third Reich imperialism and genocide.

European History Quarterly Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications,

London, Thousand Oaks, ca, and New Delhi (www.sagepublications.com), Vol 35(3), 429–464.
issn 0265-6914. doi: 10.1177/0265691405054218
 European History Quarterly, .

German South West Africa was colonial, but not typically so. Its violent subju-
gation had as much in common with the Holocaust as with other colonial mass
murders and may be regarded as a transitional case between these two categories
of violence. What distinguishes the German South West African genocide from
most other colonial mass murders is the fact that the Germans in colonial Namibia
articulated and implemented a policy of Vernichtung, or annihilation.
Wilhelmine rule in German South West Africa was not the sole inspiration for
Nazi policies in Eastern Europe, but it contributed ideas, methods, and a lexicon
that Nazi leaders borrowed and expanded. Language, literature, media, institu-
tional memory, and individual experience all transmitted these concepts, methods
and terms to the Nazis. To explore the colony’s influence on the Third Reich, it is
crucial to first contextualize it within the profound racism and violence of other
colonial regimes in Africa. Next it is important to examine how German South
West African colonial policies, including the acquisition of Lebensraum, treat-
ment of the colonized as subhuman, and legally institutionalized racism were
communicated to and borrowed by the Nazis. This essay then examines how
genocidal rhetoric, annihilation war, and the use of concentration camps were
transmitted across time and adopted. The article concludes by exploring how
Hermann Göring, Eugen Fischer, and Franz Ritter von Epp served as human
conduits for the flow of ideas and methods between the colony and Nazi Germany.

Plunder and Murder in Colonial Africa

Comparing the German South West African genocide to similar events in
Southern Rhodesia, British Natal, the Belgian Congo, and Italian Ethiopia illus-
trates that while the articulation of an annihilation policy separates the Namibian
catastrophe from these other cases of mass theft and murder, the German South
West African experience was one of many violent colonial episodes that may have
inspired Nazi conquest and genocide in Eastern Europe.
The German flag was raised over Namibia in 1884. Settlers then trickled in,
and by 1903 the colony’s 4674 Germans outnumbered those in any other
Wilhelmine overseas possession.6 In January 1904, the Herero rose up against
German rule in an attempt to end their dispossession, impoverishment, and politi-
cal subordination. After five months of sporadic conflict, 1584 German soldiers
armed with machine guns and cannons decisively defeated the Herero at the
Battle of the Waterberg.7 Commanding officer General Lothar von Trotha then
launched an explicit genocide program against the defeated nation, announcing:
‘I will annihilate the rebelling tribes with rivers of blood and rivers of gold.
Only after a complete uprooting will something new emerge.’8 Ultimately
 Madley: From Africa to Auschwitz 

40,000–70,000 Herero died; only 15,000–20,000 survived the war and subsequent
genocide.9 Alarmed by the treatment of their Herero neighbors, in October 1904
the Nama nation rose up against German oppression. By 1908 the German Army
had killed approximately half of the 12,000 to 15,000 Nama.10 Yet, the Namibian
catastrophe was not completely unique in colonial Africa. Nor was it the only
possible colonial inspiration for Nazi imperialism and genocide.
Beginning in 1893, Cecil Rhodes and his British South African Company stole
millions of acres of land and hundreds of thousands of cattle from the Mashona
and Ndebele peoples in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. When many of these
people challenged European rule in 1897, Rhodes’ forces killed thousands of men,
women and children.11 Some Europeans advocated destroying entire communi-
ties. On 29 March 1896, Rhodes’ ally Lord Jarvis wrote to his wife that ‘I hope the
natives will be pretty well exterminated . . . our plan of campaign will probably be
to . . . wipe them out . . .’, while in July he wrote to his mother, suggesting that,
‘. . . the best thing to do is to wipe them out . . . everything black’. In January 1897,
Lord Grey wrote describing the mood in the colony: even the missionary Father
Biehler felt ‘the only chance for the future of the [Mashona] race is to exterminate
the whole people, both male and female, over the age of 14!’12 Had Rhodes not
decided that funding such a war would be prohibitively expensive, Southern
Rhodesia might have become, like German South West Africa, a site of genocide.13
In 1906, dispossession, physical abuse, and oppression ignited the Bhambatha
Uprising against British rule in Natal, now a South African province.14 Colonists
then waged a two-year-long war that included sporadic massacres, such as the
‘mopping up’ of several hundred defeated warriors following the Battle of Mome
Gorge.15 Ultimately, the counterinsurgency led to the deaths of between 3500 and
4000 Africans in operations roundly condemned both in other provinces of the
future South Africa and in London.16 South African leader Jan Smuts called the
counterinsurgency ‘simply a record of loot and rapine’.17 British Colonial
Undersecretary Winston Churchill refused to award colonial troops Imperial
Medals for bravery, instead sarcastically suggesting copper medals stamped with
the decapitated head of Bhambatha, leader of the uprising.18
Some European policies killed so many Africans that they dwarfed the German
South West African genocide in scale. In the Belgian Congo, ten million Africans
were killed or worked to death in the European quest for ivory and rubber between
1885 and 1920.19 Joseph Conrad called it ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever dis-
figured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration’.20 Fifteen
years later, between 1935 and 1939, Italians killed some 250,000 Ethiopians while
Italian Colonial Minister Alessandro Lessona imagined an ‘Ethiopia without
Ethiopians’.21 Contextualized within the mass dispossession and murder of other
 European History Quarterly, .

colonial regimes in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Africa, German

policies toward the Herero and Nama appear both less aberrant and less likely to
be the sole colonial inspiration for Nazi colonialism and mass murder.
In evaluating how the Namibian experience inspired the Nazis, it is also impor-
tant to note that no continuous policy favoring genocide existed on the part of
successive German governments. Rather, the same leaders who had allowed the
Herero and Nama genocides, Kaiser Wilhelm and Chancellor von Bülow,
responded to the subsequent 1905–6 Maji Maji Uprising in German East Africa
by rejecting an overtly genocidal policy. General von Trotha’s explicit, October
1904 Vernichtungsbefehl had created a backlash of protest in Germany that led to
the order’s termination in December 1904, and to von Trotha’s transfer to
Germany in November 1905.22 Reacting to this backlash and evidence of corrup-
tion, in May 1906, the Reichstag reduced the German South West African annual
budget from 93,142,100 to 77,600,000 marks and rejected a bill calling for finan-
cial aid to the colony’s settlers.23 Then, throughout 1906, the Vernichtungsbefehl,
the use of concentration camps, and the future of the overseas empire dominated
Reichstag debates. With the Reichstag repudiating their imperial policies and
their political position threatened, Chancellor von Bülow and Kaiser Wilhelm
chose to wage a more conventional war against the Maji Maji warriors in German
East Africa. Germany would not initiate another overt genocide until the Third
Reich.

Lebensraum
Nazi colonial expansion and settlement were premised upon the desire to obtain
‘living space’, or Lebensraum. Vague notions of a need for space, inspired by
idealized constructions of medieval German migrations, gained popularity in late
nineteenth century Germany. In 1897, geographer Friedrich Ratzel coined the
term Lebensraum. Then, in 1901, he elaborated the word into a formal theory upon
which he expanded until his death in 1904.24 However, the Nazis were not the first
modern Germans to put the idea into practice. In adopting Lebensraumpolitik as a
guiding principle, the Hitler regime borrowed an idea that Ratzel had conceived
with German South West Africa in mind and that modern Germans first put into
practice there.
Ratzel’s theory had three components. First, it described the geographic space
necessary to sustain a Volk, or people. Second, it argued that a Volk must expand
its territory – by some combination of migration, colonization, and conquest – as
its population increased, or else perish from a lack of resources. Third, the
theory suggested that only a Volk with a strong agricultural base could flourish.25
 Madley: From Africa to Auschwitz 

Ratzel’s formulation of Lebensraum theory was closely connected to colonial-

ism and German South West Africa. In ‘Der Lebensraum’, Ratzel argued that ‘the
difference between . . . those populations that fail and those that advance lies in
spreading themselves . . . the areas of the failed groups lie torn apart, lawless, and
poor. Advanced populations, in contrast, find the best places . . . and . . . grow’ in
‘instance[s] of colonization’.26 When Ratzel advocated German colonies he often
mentioned Africa. According to Harriet Wanklyn, ‘Ratzel wrote with great atten-
tion to Africa [and] the fate of Africa as a great colonial territory’.27 ‘Der
Lebensraum’ does not explicitly refer to German South West Africa, but two facts
suggest that the essay was developed with the colony in mind. First, in 1892,
Ratzel wrote an article designating the colony as a great candidate for German
settlement.28 Second, as a geographer, Ratzel would have conceived of his 1901
theory knowing that Namibia was Germany’s most populous settler colony.
Thus, when Hitler wrote about Lebensraum, in the 1920s, he was likely to have
been appropriating an idea developed with colonial Namibia in mind.
Ratzel built Lebensraum theory under the assumption that ‘superior cultures’
destroy ‘inferior cultures’ in battles for living space. In his 1891 Anthropo-
geographie he claimed that, ‘The theory that dying out is predestined by the inner
weakness of the individual race is faulty . . . the decline of peoples of inferior
cultures [results from] contact with culture.’ Europeans, a people of ‘culture’,
would destroy ‘inferior’ peoples to acquire Lebensraum. To support his point he
cited population decreases among indigenous Australians, northern Asians,
Polynesians, North Americans, South Americans and Southern Africans.29 This
connection between acquiring Lebensraum and physically destroying the indige-
nous inhabitants of colonized lands would later undergird Hitler’s own linkage
between colonization and genocide in Eastern Europe.
Ratzel exerted considerable influence in Germany and on Hitler. In 1891, he
became a founding member of the pro-empire Pan-German League.30 In 1900, he
published an influential book advocating German naval expansion and he con-
tinuously published both academic and popular articles.31 Ratzel was thus able to
widely disseminate both his Lebensraum theory and his idea that Africans were
doomed to vanish in the face of European settlement. Ratzel directly influenced
Rudolf Hess, and through Hess, Adolf Hitler. According to Professor Karl
Haushofer, who repeatedly visited Hitler in Landsberg Prison, Hess read Ratzel’s
1897 Political Geography and discussed it with Hitler as the two were writing
Mein Kampf.32
When Hitler adapted Lebensraum to his own plans he built on foundations laid
in German South West Africa. Even before Ratzel had articulated Lebensraum
theory, settlers and their advocates were expressing and putting into practice
 European History Quarterly, .

nearly identical ideas. German Chancellor von Caprivi endorsed the annexation
of Namibia by proclaiming to the Reichstag, in 1893: ‘it is now German territory
and must be maintained as German territory.’33 In 1889, German colonial military
commander Curt von François portentously suggested, ‘That the natives [have]
a right to the land and [can] do with it what they like . . . cannot be contested by
talk, but only with the barrel of a gun.’34 With more diplomacy, Governor
Theodore Leutwein later wrote that, ‘the whole future of the colony lies in the
gradual transfer of the land from the hands of the work-shy natives into white
hands’.35 Commissioner for Settlement Paul Rohrbach reiterated this sentiment:
‘The decision to colonize in South West Africa means nothing else than that the
native tribes must withdraw from the lands on which they have pastured their
cattle and so let the white man pasture his cattle on these self-same lands’.36
Finally, a 1901 Deutsch-Südwestafrikanische Zeitung article agreed: ‘the land, of
course must be transferred from the hands of the natives to those of the whites,
[this] is the object of colonization in the territory. The land shall be settled by
whites. So the natives must give way and either become servants of the whites or
withdraw’.37 Probably without ever having read Ratzel’s works, Germans put
Lebensraum discourse into practice in German South West Africa, thus testing an
idea that Nazis later pursued by seizing and settling Eastern Europe.
Settlers and their advocates rationalized taking African land and wealth by
claiming inherent German superiority and martial necessity. Then, they sup-
ported these theories with force. It was the same simple, brutal logic Hitler
employed in Eastern Europe when he wrote of ‘the right to possess soil’, German
racial superiority, and acquiring Lebensraum ‘by the sword’.38 Nazis sometimes
even directly linked Lebensraum theory to the lost Wilhelmine colonies. For
example, according to the 1940 official biography of Bavarian governor Ritter von
Epp, ‘The fight for the re-winning of overseas German Lebensraum [began] when
Hitler and his movement came to power’.39
Some Nazis overtly mentioned German South West Africa when promoting
Lebensraum theory. Pro-Nazi author Hans Grimm celebrated the space he had
found during 14 years in South Africa and German South West Africa in his 1926
People without Space. The novel was a key element of Nazi Lebensraum propa-
ganda, selling 315,000 copies by 1935, and ultimately some 700,000 copies in
Germany.40 Writing as Nazi Party Colonial Policy Office chief, in 1934, von Epp
described German South West Africa simply as ‘Lebensraum’.41 Six years later,
when asking, ‘Why did we go to South West Africa at all?’, he replied ‘because . . .
a growing people needed both room to expand and growing economic resources’.42
Adopted from Ratzel and the Second Reich, Lebensraum theory undergirded
Hitler’s grand vision and subsequent Nazi expansion. In Mein Kampf, Hitler
 Madley: From Africa to Auschwitz 

argued that, ‘the acquisition of new soil for the settlement of the excess [German]
population possesses an infinite number of advantages’.43 Hitler then went on to
reiterate repeatedly Ratzel’s claim that, ‘Only an adequate large space on this
earth assures a nation freedom of existence’.44 He also emphasized that the Nazi
Party, ‘must . . . lead this people from its present restricted living space to
new land and soil, and . . . must strive to eliminate the disproportion between our
population and our area’.45 For Hitler, as for Ratzel, it was crucial ‘to secure for the
German people the land and the soil to which they are entitled on this earth’.46 On
23 May 1939, Hitler further restated Ratzel’s thesis by claiming that obtaining
Lebensraum ‘is impossible without invading other countries or attacking other
people’s possessions’.47 Yet, Hitler did not receive the Lebensraum idea from
Ratzel alone. Germans had already invaded others’ land in Namibia, thus making
the practice of Lebensraum theory part of a lived collective German experience.
Throughout the Second World War, Nazi leaders proclaimed Lebensraum a
prime objective. In an April 1940 press conference Propaganda Minister Joseph
Goebbels described his view of ‘the New Europe’ in a single word: ‘Lebensraum’.48
On 20 January 1942, at the Wannsee Conference, SS Intelligence chief Reinhard
Heydrich summarized the progress of the ‘Final Solution’ by linking extermina-
tion with the acquisition of living space: ‘We have forced them [the Jews] out of the
Lebensraum of the people.’49 Commanding German troops in occupied Poland,
General Bock justified ‘otherwise uncommonly harsh measures towards the
Polish population of the occupied areas’ by emphasizing to subordinates the need
to ‘secure German Lebensraum and the solutions to ethnic political problems
ordered by the Führer’.50
Once land was taken, Nazis followed the German South West African eco-
nomic model by brutally subordinating indigenous resources to German purposes
in order to create the agricultural utopia described by Lebensraum theory.
Heinrich Himmler’s Generalplanost, or General Plan East, aimed to exploit
Eastern Europe for raw materials, energy, food, and labor even if the process
meant destroying local economies, uprooting communities, instituting slavery,
and murdering millions.
Although in Mein Kampf Hitler wrote that Germany’s ‘territorial policy
cannot be fulfilled in the Cameroons [a Wilhelmine colony in Africa], but today
almost exclusively in Europe,’ he later adopted the Lebensraum idea for Africa,
demanding ‘the return of all . . . former colonial territories’.51 Hitler wanted both to
recreate Germany’s 1914 imperium and develop a vast Eastern European ‘living
space’. Hitler thus borrowed Wilhelmine Lebensraum policy and expanded it to
include Eastern Europe.
 European History Quarterly, .

Colonized People as Sub-humans

German South West African colonists pioneered the implementation of a
Weltanschauung, later adopted by the Nazis, in which superior Germans ruled
over sub-human non-Germans with brutality and slavery. This paradigm pro-
vided new ideas and methods for Nazi colonialism that were transferred to
Germany and to future Nazis by a variety of vectors, of which colonial literature
is one easily documented.52
In their books, colonists and government employees frequently advocated the
idea of superior Germans ruling over inferior Africans. In 1907, Theodore
Leutwein tried to justify German rule over Africans, writing of ‘the higher Kultur
of the Whites’, while missionary Heinrich Vedder wrote of whites’ ‘undoubted’
racial ‘superiority’.53 Others went far beyond simply trying to rationalize German
subordination of Africans.
Some authors tried to justify extermination. In 1906, Captain Maximilian
Bayer wrote that God had ordained the Namas’ destruction. According to Bayer,
‘Our Lord has made the law of nature such that only the strong of the world have
a right to continuity, while the weak and purposeless will perish in favor of the
strong’. He then prophesied that ‘the day will come when the Hottentots [Nama]
will disappear, but it will not be a loss for humanity because they are all only born
robbers and thieves, nothing more’.54 In 1907, colonial bureaucrat Paul Rohrbach
tried to use economics to justify exterminating the Nama: ‘From the point of view
of the economy of the country, the Hottentots [Namas] are generally regarded, in
the wider sense, as useless, and in this respect, provide no justification for the
preservation of this race’.55 Colonial Namibian literature thus exposed metro-
politan Germans to a new form of racism in which non-Germans had the right to
exist only in so far as they served Germans and in which some authors even
endorsed extermination.
Literature also introduced metropolitan Germans to routine brutality as part of
colonial rule. After the murder of Herero princess Louisa Kamana, Governor
Leutwein observed, ‘Everywhere people asked themselves if the whites then
had the right to shoot native women’.56 Others wrote in metaphors. In his 1905
memoir, former Judge H. Hanemann proclaimed of his time on the colonial bench
that, ‘a single drop of white blood was just as precious to me as the life of one of our
black fellow-citizens’.57 Brutality was sometimes depicted in photographs.
Bayer’s 1909 book displayed naked and partially clad men, women and children
with the caption ‘Captive Hereros’. Another photograph featured a prisoner,
surrounded by German troops, held on a leash.58 Three years later, Erich von
Salzmann presented a two-page photographic spread depicting naked, emaciated
 Madley: From Africa to Auschwitz 

female African prisoners.59 In 1905, Conrad Rust’s memoir featured a photo of

three Herero men stripped naked and hanging dead from the branches of a tree.60
Perhaps most shocking, a 1907 war chronicle recorded that, ‘A chest of Herero
skulls was recently sent by troops from German South West Africa to the patho-
logical institute in Berlin, where they will be subjected to scientific measure-
ments,’ before noting that, ‘Herero women have removed the flesh [from the
skulls] with the aid of glass shards’.61 Evidence of skulls being sent from the
colony to Germany was also communicated to Germans through a popular post-
card depicting German soldiers loading a chest with African skulls.62 In colonial
Namibia, Africans were routinely beaten, flogged, raped, and sometimes killed.
During the counterinsurgency, violence escalated far beyond the limits set by con-
ventional European martial modes. Colonial authors and photographers reported
this brutality and introduced it into the German national discourse.
Just prior to the Herero uprising, Paramount Chief Samuel Maherero wrote,
‘All our patience with the Germans is of little avail, for each day they shoot some-
one dead for no reason at all’.63 There is no direct link between colonial Namibian
brutality and Hitler’s 13 May 1941 order legalizing the shooting of civilians in
the East by the Wehrmacht, but German South West African brutality had set a
precedent.64 Leutwein’s explanation of settlers’ attitudes toward the Herero could
easily describe Nazi attitudes toward Slavs: ‘the Europeans flooding into
Hereroland were inclined, with their inborn feeling of belonging to a superior race,
to appear as members of a conquering army’.65 Colonial literature transferred
violent, racist concepts to Germany, thus eroding resistance to brutality and
providing ideas and methods that the Nazis later expanded.
Colonial authors also informed metropolitan Germans of the colony’s un-
official slavery system. In his 1912 bestseller, Paul Rohrbach wrote, euphemisti-
cally, that Africans must be ‘compelled to serve . . . in our African colonies [as] it is
obvious that the black must be the serving people’.66 Others were more direct. In
Gustav Frenssen’s 1906 novel, Peter Moor’s Journey to South West Africa, the
protagonist is at first shocked when he hears ‘soldiers, farmers, and traders’ advo-
cating the treatment of Hereros as ‘slaves without legal rights’, but quickly con-
cludes that ‘they are not our brothers, but our slaves’.67 Behind closed doors, some
Germans were just as explicit. In 1904, Army General Staff Chief Alfred von
Schlieffen advocated keeping black Namibians ‘in a state of forced labour, indeed
in a kind of slavery’, while in 1907, a Swakopmund civil servant described the
colony’s Africans as ‘Sklaven’ or slaves.68
In parallel thinking perhaps derived, in part, from colonial Namibia, Nazis
later described Slavs as Sklaven, whose right to life hinged upon their utility to
Germans. In 1939, Hitler said he wanted Poles to become ‘cheap slaves’.69
 European History Quarterly, .

Following this lead, the Nazi Governor of rump Poland, Hans Frank, proclaimed
that the region ‘shall be treated like a colony . . . the Poles will become the slaves
of the Greater German Empire’.70 Then, on 17 September 1941, Hitler made a
broader claim: ‘The Slavs are a mass of born slaves, who feel the need for a
master’.71 In a speech to SS generals on 4 October 1943, Himmler expanded on this
theme. He spoke of non-Aryans as slaves, and like Rohrbach, emphasized that
their right to exist depended upon service to the Volk: ‘Whether nations live in
prosperity or starve to death interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves
for our Kultur’.72 Nazi Reich Commissioner for the Ukraine Erich Koch fre-
quently referred to Ukrainians as ‘white Negroes’ and spoke of waging colonial
war in the Ukraine ‘as among Negroes’.73 Living under his rule, one Ukrainian
woman wrote in her diary, ‘We are like slaves’.74 Nazi policies toward Slavs
retraced German South West African patterns. However, with their emphasis on
enslaving all Slavs, killing millions of others, and exterminating all Jews, Nazi
plans were even more draconian and ambitious.

Legally Institutionalized Racism

Parallels between German South West African and Third Reich race laws indicate
that the colony’s legal system provided conceptual and linguistic prototypes
from which Nazi lawmakers borrowed extensively. Like the Nazis, Germans in
colonial Namibia embedded racism into their legal system. Leutwein noted that,
‘(r)acial hatred has become rooted in the very framework of justice’.75 Colonists
could legally beat African employees with whips and fists under the Väterliche
Züchtigungsrecht, or paternal right of correction.76 Even Herero Chief Assa
Riarua ‘was flogged until the blood ran’.77 Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century Germany was rife with discussion concerning the perceived dangers of
miscegenation and the notion of racial struggle. In German South West Africa
these ideas became German law for the first time. Concurrently, Germans in
colonial Namibia coined new racist concepts and introduced them to metropolitan
Germans while amplifying others already in circulation.
German South West Africa’s 1905 law banning Rassenmischung, or race mix-
ing, demonstrates how certain race laws and associated rhetoric were pioneered in
the colony, received wide exposure in Germany, and were then adopted by the
Third Reich.78 The ban on interracial marriage associated it with the new term
Rassenschande, meaning racial shame.79 Officials in other colonies followed colo-
nial Namibia and promulgated similar laws in German East Africa (1906) and
German Samoa (1912) that were, in the words of Lora Wildenthal, ‘unique in all
the European colonial empires of the day’. Then, in 1909, German South West
 Madley: From Africa to Auschwitz 

Africans promulgated a law punishing interracial marriage and cohabitation with

loss of suffrage.80
Namibia’s 1905 interracial marriage ban catalyzed a movement to institute
similar laws in Germany. Although never legislated into law, Reichstag debates
and press coverage brought the colony’s race laws and terminology under domes-
tic German scrutiny, amplifying their prominence in public discourse. Between
1905 and 1912, Reichstag members conducted repeated debates concerned with
Rassenreinheit [racial purity] and laws banning interracial marriage. During
these debates representatives spoke of Rassengefühl [racial feeling], Mischlinge
[mixed-race people], die Mischlingsfrage [the mixed-race question], and the
‘irreparable harm . . . racial mixing [causes to] our national consciousness’.81
Given Germans’ exposure to these terms and ideas, amplified by seven years of
Reichstag debates, it is not surprising that Nazis deployed vocabulary nearly
identical to German South West African Rassenmischung laws and associated
Reichstag debates when they criminalized marriage and sexual intercourse
between Jews and ‘Aryan’ Germans. Linguistic connections indicate wholesale
borrowing. Hitler argued in Mein Kampf that introducing African blood into the
Aryan nation would ‘deprive the white race of the basis for its autocratic existence
by infecting it with inferior humanity’.82 The Nazi Party spoke of ‘racial defile-
ment’, and the Reich doctors’ leader Gerhard Wagner warned of ‘racial poisoning
and pollution of German blood’.83 The term Rassenschande, first connected to law
in German South West Africa, provides a particularly close link between colonial
Namibia and the Nazis. Hitler spoke and wrote repeatedly of Rassenschande until
the term became standard Nazi propaganda parlance.84 Indeed, in noting how the
German South West African missionary Wandres termed interracial sex, ‘sinning
against racial consciousness’, Zimmerer observed, ‘it is not hard to recognize a
parallel with . . . the racial laws of the Third Reich’.85
German South West African race laws provided legal concepts later applied by
Nazi lawmakers. As in the colony, ‘Mischlinge’ became a topic of concern in the
Nazi Justice Ministry while both the 1935 Defense Law prohibiting soldiers from
marrying ‘persons of non-Aryan origin’ and the Nuremberg Laws criminalizing
marriage and sex between Jews and ‘Aryan’ Germans were simply variants of
German South West African laws against interracial marriage and cohabitation.86
In both colonial Namibia and the Third Reich, German lawmakers transformed
racism into legal discrimination, thus removing an important barrier to the most
severe form of racial intolerance: genocide.
 European History Quarterly, .

Genocidal Rhetoric
On 12 January 1904, Chief Maherero announced to the Herero people: ‘I fight.’ He
then commanded them to ‘kill!’87 Within days, 123 Europeans were dead.88 Initial
Herero attacks on 267 German farms and businesses provoked war fever and
inspired murderous rhetoric among both colonial and metropolitan Germans.89
This oratory was then passed to the Nazis through political discourse and litera-
ture, serving as a crucial antecedent to genocidal Nazi thought and speech.
Annihilationist ‘cleansing’ rhetoric developed quickly in the colony. According
to one missionary, ‘The Germans are filled with fearful hate and a frightful thirst
for revenge, I must really call it a blood thirst, against the Hereros. One hears
nothing but talk of “cleaning up”, “executing”, “shooting down to the last man”,
“no pardon”, etc.’ Likewise, the chief engineer of the Otavi Construction Com-
pany reported, ‘everyone here believes that the uprising must be smashed ruth-
lessly and a tabula rasa created’.90 Indeed, the commander of German troops in
Swakopmund telegraphed the German Foreign Office on 19 January 1904 to urge
that ‘the Hereros be dismissed, ruthlessly punished and a tabula rasa created’.91
A vengeful, genocidal rhetoric also arose in Germany. The German Colonial
Society publicly suggested that:
Anyone familiar with the life of the African and other less civilized non-
white peoples knows that Europeans can assert themselves only by main-
taining the supremacy of their race at all costs. Moreover . . . the swifter
and harsher the reprisals taken . . . the better the chances of restoring
authority.92
More portentously, on 17 March 1904 Reichstag delegate Ludwig zu
Reventlow questioned the Hereros’ very humanity in a speech admonishing his
fellow legislators: ‘Do not apply too much humanity to bloodthirsty beasts in the
form of humans.’93 Then, in 1906, the notion of creating ‘virgin territory . . . with
streams of blood’ became a rallying cry of the small German Social Party.94 The
press then amplified these ideas.
Annihilationist ideas and phrases also entered German public discourse via
memoirs and writing about the colony. Using an expression later associated with
the Holocaust, government geologist Doctor Hartmann wrote in 1904, that ‘the
“final solution” [Endlösung] to the native question can only be to break the power
of the natives totally and for all time’.95 As ominously, in 1907, Kurt Schwabe
titled the final chapter of his war memoir, ‘The End of the Herero People’.96 The
same year Rohrbach wrote that, ‘To secure the peaceful white settlement against
the bad, culturally inept and predatory native tribe, it is possible that its actual
 Madley: From Africa to Auschwitz 

eradication may become necessary’.97 Later, in his 1912 best-seller, Rohrbach

wrote, ‘No false philosophy or race-theory can prove to reasonable people that the
preservation of any tribe of nomadic South African Kaffirs . . . is more important
for the future of mankind than the expansion of the great European nations’.
Rohrbach even hinted at achieving ‘the extermination’ of Namibia’s ‘bushmen’.98
Nazi annihilationist rhetoric sometimes directly echoed German South West
African phrases and frequently connected annihilation with colonial goals.
Indeed, the Nazis’ blueprint for the East broadly replicated the colonization of
Herero lands. Nazis envisioned largely emptying the land of sub-humans to
create a vast Lebensraum. On this tabula rasa they planned to inscribe a new,
utopian social order, populated by Aryan farmers ruling over Slavic slaves.99
Following the 1904 uprising, Germans cleared Herero lands of people they con-
sidered sub-human before enslaving survivors. In a further possible borrowing,
Nazis deployed a remarkably similar dehumanizing rhetoric to that used by
Germans in connection with colonial Namibia.
When zu Reventlow suggested that the Herero were ‘beasts in the form of
humans’, he articulated a concept that later became central to Nazi ideology and
genocidal thought: ‘Not every being with a human face is human.’ The phrase
appeared time and again in the speeches of Hitler and other prominent Nazis.100
Although its origins are obscure, the similarity between the two phrases suggests
that Nazis may have borrowed this rhetoric from the Namibian genocide and
applied it to their own.
The centrality of Vernichtungskrieg, or war of annihilation, to both genocides
suggests an even more intimate connection between the two catastrophes. On 30
January 1939, Hitler publicly threatened European Jewry with annihilation: ‘If the
international Jewish financial establishment in Europe and beyond succeeds in
plunging the peoples of the world into yet another world war, then the result will
not be a Bolshevization of the globe and thus a victory for Jewry, but the annihila-
tion [Vernichtung] of the Jewish race in Europe.’ Nazi periodicals Der Stürmer
and Das Schwarze Korps routinely used the word ‘annihilation’; indeed it was
central to Nazi propaganda.101

Vernichtungskrieg
Historians regularly proclaim Hitler’s war in the East unprecedented in ferocity
and scale. This is true. However, when one considers the genocidal wars fought
against the Herero and Nama, four striking similarities suggest that these
colonial campaigns incubated many elements of the Vernichtungskrieg later
waged by Nazi forces. First, German military leaders defined both conflicts as
 European History Quarterly, .

Rassenkampf, or race war. Second, both armies articulated a Vernichtungskrieg

strategy predicated on physically destroying the enemy. Third, as part of this
strategy, German military leaders, in both wars, systematically murdered
prisoners of war (POWs) and civilians.102 Finally, in each case, leaders employed
the rhetoric of public health in attempts to rationalize mass murder. These ideas
and methods were communicated to Germany and future Nazi leaders through
speeches, the press, and colonial literature. As Zimmerer has suggested, ‘the
war against the Herero and Nama . . . was a step towards the National Socialist
annihilation war’.103
The idea of Rassenkampf underpinned German strategy in the Herero and
Nama wars, eroded restraint, and opened the door to military engagement with-
out limits under Hitler. As von Trotha prepared to assume command, the Kaiser
ordered him to ‘crush the rebellion by all means necessary’, thus implying that the
Herero were unworthy of protections afforded to European opponents.104 Von
Trotha then declared the Herero inhuman, proclaiming in the 2 August 1904
Berliner Lokalanzeiger that, ‘no war may be conducted humanely against non-
humans’.105 Soon thereafter, von Trotha and von Schlieffen both privately called
the conflict ‘racial war’ while, after the genocide, von Trotha publicly wrote of it as
a Rassenkampf.106
Von Trotha’s plan to ‘annihilate these masses’ was clear in his own mind, but
he and others made the policy explicit to all Germans.107 According to the 1906
German General Staff official history, ‘If . . . the Herero . . . broke through [at the
Waterberg], such an outcome of the battle could only be even more desirable in
the eyes of the German Command because the enemy would then seal his own
fate, being doomed to die of thirst in the Sandveld [Omaheke Desert]’.108 After
the battle, von Trotha announced his genocide policy in the 2 October 1904
Vernichtungsbefehl, or Annihilation Order:
All Hereros must leave the country. If they do not do so, I will force them
with cannons to do so. Within the German borders, every Herero, with
or without weapons . . . will be shot. I shall no longer shelter women and
children. They must either return to their people or they will be shot at.109
Prevented from escaping, thousands died in the desert. The General Staff history
described the Vernichtung strategy: the ‘waterless Omaheke was expected to
complete that which the German troops had begun: the annihilation [Vernicht-
ung] of the Herero people’.110 The history went on:
The shutting off of the Sandveld, which was carried on for months with
iron firmness, completed the work of destruction. . . . The death rattle of the
 Madley: From Africa to Auschwitz 

dying and the shrieks of the maddened people – these echoed through
the solemn silence of eternity. The court had now concluded its work of
punishment.111
The Vernichtungsbefehl was publicly debated in Germany, reported in the press,
and quoted in books like Conrad Rust’s 1905 war memoir.112 Through these con-
duits, future Nazi leaders received a new definition, Vernichtungskrieg: a military
doctrine advocating victory through the physical annihilation of the entire enemy
population.
Echoing German South West African strategy and rhetoric, Nazi leaders
defined their war in the East as both a race war and a Vernichtungskrieg. On 22
August 1939, Hitler spoke to senior military officers about the coming invasion of
Poland. According to Helmuth Greiner’s diary, Hitler proclaimed that: ‘The war
would be waged with the greatest brutality and ruthlessness and until Poland was
totally destroyed. The goal was not to occupy land but to annihilate all forces.’113
Then, in September 1939, Hitler told Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg and
General Wilhelm Kertch that the Polish war ‘would be . . . a brutal racial war
[Volkstumkampf] which would admit no legal restrictions’.114 In March 1941,
Hitler announced to some 200 generals that the war against the Soviet Union
would be ‘a battle of annihilation’.115 According to Richard Overy, ‘The war
against the Soviet Union was defined by Hitler as a Vernichtungskrieg’.116 The
practical result of this rhetoric was a radical departure from European rules of
martial conduct. However, while they killed on a scale never before seen in
German history, the Nazi Vernichtungskrieg tactic of murdering POWs en masse
was pioneered in German South West Africa.
Von Trotha’s troops regularly executed POWs. Leutwein wrote to the German
Colonial Department, five months into the conflict, to report that not a single
prisoner had yet been taken.117 Manuel Timbu, who served as von Trotha’s
groom, testified that, ‘I was for nearly two years with the German troops and
always with General von Trotha. I know of no instance in which prisoners were
spared’.118 Jan Kubas, who also served under von Trotha, simply noted, ‘The
Germans took no prisoners’.119
Metropolitan Germans learned of these war crimes from returning veterans
and colonial literature. Leafing through Erich von Salzmann’s 1912 war memoir,
readers would have come across a photo of a ‘mass grave at Owikokorero’; while
reading the General Staff’s war history they would have discovered that von
Trotha allowed his troops to execute ‘all armed men who were captured’.120 Even
German scientific books mentioned mass POW executions.121 Metropolitan
Germans also learned of their army’s abandonment of internationally recognized
 European History Quarterly, .

rules of military engagement from Von Trotha himself. In the 3 February 1909 Der
Deutschen Zeitung, he argued that the war could not have been waged ‘according
to the laws of the Geneva Convention’.122 Although other German colonial forces
had killed POWs in earlier counterinsurgencies, they had never butchered
captured warriors on so large a scale or simply for belonging to a particular ethnic
group. The mass murder of Herero POWs signified a departure from German
military tradition, corroded German military morality and set precedents for even
more extreme behavior by Hitler’s Wehrmacht in Eastern Europe.
Nazis rejected international standards of martial conduct protecting POWs to
carry out their own, vast annihilation war. Under the 1941 Commissar Order,
German units moved into the Soviet Union with instructions to execute all
captured Communist party functionaries, both military and civilian. During the
first six months of the invasion, over two million Soviet POWs were executed or
starved to death.123 Later, many were killed in slave labor, concentration and
death camps. In total, some 3.3 million Soviet POWs died in German captivity.124
According to a letter from Lieutenant von Beaulieu, quoted in the General
Staff’s 1906 war history, von Trotha forbade the killing of Herero women and
children.125 Yet, von Trotha’s troops murdered African civilians in great numbers
and no punishment ensued. After the Battle of the Waterberg, von Trotha chased
most of the Herero into the desert where stragglers were bayoneted, shot and
burned alive en masse. According to one Bergdamara who fought with the
Germans, ‘We hesitated to kill Herero women and children, but the Germans
spared no one. They killed thousands and thousands. We saw this slaughter day
after day’.126 Timbu noted, ‘the soldiers shot all natives we came across,’ while
Kubas related how the Germans ‘killed thousands and thousands of women and
children along the roadsides’.127
Like von Trotha, Nazi leaders targeted civilians in order to clear the land. For
example, Hitler ordered his generals to ‘kill without mercy all men, women, and
children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain the living
space we need’.128 Even more broadly, Nazis planned to depopulate Soviet areas
intended for Aryan settlement from 75 million to no more than 30 million people,
anticipating the killing or removal of some 45 million Slavs.129 Thus, SS General
Erich von dem Bach-Zeleweski, head of Eastern European counterinsurgency
operations, fought partisans using tactics intended to ‘achieve Himmler’s goal of
reducing the Slavic population to thirty million’.130
Like German leaders in colonial Namibia, the Nazis made it clear that German
forces in Eastern Europe could kill civilians without fear of punishment. The so-
called ‘Barbarossa Decree’, much like the 1904 Vernichtungsbefehl, allowed
reprisals and protected Germans from prosecution in military courts for actions
 Madley: From Africa to Auschwitz 

against Soviet civilians.131 The aims behind the decree transcended military objec-
tives. On 16 July 1941, Hitler proclaimed to Marshal Göring, Chancellery Chief
Lammers, Nazi Party Foreign Affairs Chief Rosenberg and Armed Forces Chief
of Staff Keitel that in the Soviet Union Germans should seize ‘the opportunity to
exterminate anyone who is hostile to us [since] naturally the vast area must be
pacified as quickly as possible; this will happen best through shooting anyone
who even looks askance at us’.132
To rationalize goals and methods that violated Christian morality and
European martial norms, German leaders in both colonial Namibia and Eastern
Europe deployed public health rhetoric. Although discussions of racial hygiene
and eugenics were common in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
Germany, these linguistic overlaps suggest that rhetoric associated with German
South West Africa was a source from which Nazis borrowed. In his diary, von
Trotha wrote, ‘Hereros, women and children, come in big numbers to ask for
water. Have given orders to chase them back by force, because an accumulation of
a big number of prisoners would constitute a danger to the provisioning and
health of the troops’.133 He then wrote to von Schlieffen, ‘I think it is better that the
[Herero] nation perish rather than infect our troops and affect our water and
food’.134 Accordingly, a German officer told Hendrik Campbell, who commanded
the Germans’ Rehobother Baster auxiliaries, to burn Herero women alive in their
huts since, ‘they might be infected with some disease’.135
By trying to rationalize genocide as a response to a threat to German health,
von Trotha and his officers supplied a genocidal public health rhetoric that Nazis
seem to have appropriated. In a 1943 speech to SS officers, Himmler proclaimed
that, ‘Anti-Semitism is exactly the same thing as delousing. Getting rid of lice is
not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness’.136 Indeed, SS gas chamber
operators were called Desinfektoren, or disinfectors, in Nazi parlance.137 Propa-
ganda Minister Goebbels also used medical language to describe genocide: ‘Our
task here is surgical [to make] drastic incisions, or some day Europe will perish of
the Jewish disease’.138
In late December 1904, domestic pressure forced the German government to
retract the Annihilation Order. As early as March 1904, August Bebel criticized
the war against the Herero as ‘not just barbaric, but bestial’ while conservative
preacher Adolf Stoecker argued in the Reichstag that, ‘one may not judge the
Herero as beasts’.139 Karl Schrader, a left liberal, also argued in the Reichstag that,
‘these people [the Herero] are also human’, while representatives of the Catholic
Center Party further attacked von Trotha’s tactics.140 The Kaiser responded to
these complaints by lifting the Vernichtungsbefehl. However, this only led to a
new phase of the genocide.
 European History Quarterly, .

Concentration Camps
Many Herero survivors responded to the termination of von Trotha’s Annihila-
tion Order by returning from the desert and surrendering. Arriving home they
found their dispossession completed: they no longer owned any land or cattle and
were legally prohibited from doing so; they were forced to become laborers
and could not travel without permission from whites.141 However, the theft did not
stop at land and cattle. First, thousands of surrendering Hereros, and later
Namas, were seized. Then they were taken, often in railway cattle cars called
Transport, to death and work camps where their lives were stolen.142
Nazis neither invented the concentration camp nor pioneered its use by
Germans. The first German concentration camps were built in colonial Namibia
and on 11 December 1904, Konzentrationslager, or concentration camp, was
introduced into the German language. Chancellor von Bülow wrote the word in a
letter commanding von Trotha to rescind the Annihilation Order and ‘establish
Konzentrationslager for the temporary housing and sustenance of the Herero
people’.143 Von Bülow likely borrowed the word and the institution from the
British, who had incarcerated Boer men, women, and children in barbed wire
compounds during the 1899–1902 South African War. The British in turn had
made use of the concentration camp concept developed by Spaniards in Cuba.144
After being further pioneered by von Trotha, two variants of these camps were
then adopted, again refined, and deployed on a massive scale by the Nazis.
Officially blurred together under the term ‘Konzentrationslager’, von Trotha’s
camps were unofficially divided into two categories: camps geared simply to kill,
and camps where prisoners were worked under conditions that routinely led to
death. Colonial Namibia’s death camp at Shark Island was different from Spanish
and British concentration camps in that it was operated for the purpose of destroy-
ing human life. Thus, it served as a rough model for later Nazi Vernichtungslager,
or annihilation camps, like Treblinka and Auschwitz, whose primary purpose
was murder. The second variant, German South West African work camps,
were also innovative: geared not merely toward incarcerating guerilla rebels and
potentially sympathetic civilians, as in Cuba and South Africa, their purpose was
to extract economic value from prisoners under conditions that camp administra-
tors anticipated would lead to mass fatalities. Thus, the Second Reich’s colonial
Namibian work camps provided a rough template for Third Reich concentration
camps like Buchenwald and Dachau.
Operational from 1905 to 1907, Haifischinsel, or Shark Island, was the
twentieth century’s first death camp. Though referred to as a Konzentrationslager
in Reichstag debates, it functioned as an extermination center.145 Located on a bare
 Madley: From Africa to Auschwitz 

granite island in the cold fog of the South Atlantic, German troops referred to it as
Todesinsel, or Death Island.146 Like later Nazi death camps, the isolated killing
center’s location and operation were calculated to kill, beyond the public gaze, but
within proximity to the railroads used to deliver victims from distant regions. The
Nazi death camps’ immediate, industrialized murder of most arrivals still lay
decades in the future, but Shark Island was operated with the intent to annihilate.
The difference was one of method and scale.147 Shark Island was more akin to Nazi
death camps than to Spanish or British concentration camps but was a transi-
tional institution between these early concentration camps and later Nazi death
camps.
More people died at Shark Island than at any other German South West
African concentration camp. Rape, malnutrition, beatings, inadequate housing,
and minimal medical care in the face of typhus outbreaks destroyed the minds
and ultimately the bodies of African inmates. Others were simply executed.
Numerous witnesses attested to frequent deaths inside the camp. According to
Herero Chief Daniel Kariko, who visited in September 1905, ‘We had no proper
clothing, no blankets, and the night air on the sea was bitterly cold. The wet sea
fogs drenched us and made our teeth chatter.’ He went on. ‘The people died there
like flies that had been poisoned. The great majority died there. The little children
and the old people died first, and then the women and the weaker men. No
day passed without many deaths’.148 The Chronicle of the Community of
Lüderitzbucht provides a description from early 1906: ‘Approximately 2000
Herero POWs were interned on . . . Shark Island. . . . Daily the number of sick
increased. As many as 27 died each day’.149 On 6 October 1906, a missionary
named Laaf wrote to the Rhenish Mission Society in Germany and suggested ‘a
weekly estimate of 50 deaths’. Two months later he wrote again: ‘The mortality
. . . is frighteningly high. If it continues like this, it will not take long before the
entire community is killed off’.150 Casper Erichsen has concluded that, ‘at least
2000 people died on the small island’.151 The numbers may have been higher.
According to Fritz Isaac, some 3500 people were sent to Shark Island, but only 193
left when the camp closed in 1907.152 German authorities were well aware of what
was happening there. In December 1906, a Social Democrat named Ledebour
stood before the Reichstag, Chancellor von Bülow, and Colonial Minister
Dernburg to read out the following letter printed in the Koenigsberger
Volkszeitung: ‘Around 2,000 are presently under German imprisonment. They
surrendered against the guarantee of life, but were nevertheless transferred to
Shark Island in Lüderitz, where, as a doctor assured me, they will all die within
two years due to the climate.’153 Underlining the annihilation policy, in 1907,
acting Governor Oskar Hintrager refused a request to remove 230 women and
 European History Quarterly, .

children from the island, replying, ‘It will not be possible for them to return to their
homes and to tell others of their treatment there’.154
Shark Island’s lethal policies were communicated to metropolitan Germans
through a variety of channels. Within the government, Ludwig von Estorff
reported that between October 1906 and March 1907, a total of 1032 prisoners out
of 1795 died at the camp.155 Among the armed forces, the ‘conditions and conse-
quences’ of Shark Island ‘left an impression on many soldiers . . . and were there-
fore included in many of the Schutztruppe diaries published following the
war,’ according to Erichsen. One contemporary described the camp for German
readers: ‘On the south-western side of the island there was a camp of up to 3000
Hottentot [Nama] prisoners. This part of the camp was separated from the rest by
a barbed wire fence and on top of that was also guarded. . . .The cold nights and
probably also the misery of their fate, as well as outbreak of disease, resulted in the
poor souls dying in large numbers’.156 The Shark Island annihilation project was
also communicated to metropolitan Germans through ongoing Reichstag debates
and subsequent press reports.
In addition to pioneering death camp methods, Shark Island contributed a
genocidal rhetorical mode to German public discourse that the Nazis appear to
have borrowed. During Reichstag debates Colonial Minister Dernburg spoke
euphemistically of how the prisoners ‘died off [eingehen]’ on Shark Island, thus
suggesting that a natural selection process – not unlike Hitler’s theory that ‘the
weaker one falls’ – was responsible for the deaths, rather than German policies.157
In a similar attempt to downplay the moral ramifications of murder, Reichstag
Vice President and National Liberal deputy Hermann Paasche publicly dehu-
manized the victims as ‘laboring animals’ in a Reichstag speech. Even those
pleading for humane treatment, like colonial bureaucrat Friedrich von Lindquist,
publicly dehumanized Africans as ‘human material’.158
The German jargon of genocide, deployed in connection with colonial
Namibia, left a legacy adopted and expanded upon by the Nazis. Some Nazi
terms, like Rassenschande, Transport, Konzentrationslager and Endlösung, had
already been deployed in German South West Africa and thus imbued with
malevolent meaning. New Nazi terms, like lebensunwerte Leben (‘lives unworthy
of life’), Sonderbehandlung (‘special handling’) for executions, and Spezialein-
richtungen (‘special installations’) for gas chambers simultaneously sought to
justify and camouflage genocide in much the same way that mass-murder
euphemisms had served the same purpose in connection with German South West
Africa.
The colony’s labor camp system, with major installations in Lüderitz (across
the water from Shark Island), Okahandja, Swakopmund, and Windhoek, as well
 Madley: From Africa to Auschwitz 

as minor installations scattered about the colony, suggests itself as the inspiration
for another Nazi institution: the vast work camp system. Indeed, Zimmerer has
suggested that ‘forced-labor’ was a ‘central aspect’ of the connection between
‘German colonial rule in South West Africa’ and ‘National Socialism’.159
Like the Nazis, administrators in German South West Africa resolved the
tension between deriving economic value from prisoners and quickly murdering
them by working detainees to death. Planning for mass death at the Swakopmund
work camp, authorities kept a Totenregister, or death register, and death certifi-
cates pre-printed with ‘death by exhaustion followed by privation’.160 The
Swakopmund missionary chronicles vividly describe the camp in 1905:
When missionary Vedder arrived in Swakopmund in 1905 there were very
few Herero present. Shortly thereafter vast transports of prisoners of war
arrived. They were placed behind double rows of barbed wire fencing . . .
and housed in pathetic [jammerlichen] structures constructed out of
simple sacking and planks, in such a manner that in one structure 30–50
people were forced to stay. . . . From early morning until late at night, on
weekdays as well as on Sundays and holidays, they had to work under the
clubs of raw overseers [Knutteln roher Aufseher], until they broke down
[zusammenbrachen]. Added to this the food was extremely scarce. Rice
without any necessary additions was not enough to support their bodies,
already weakened by life in the field [as refugees] and used to the hot sun
of the interior, from the cold and restless exertion of all their powers in the
prison conditions of Swakopmund. Like cattle hundreds were driven to
death and like cattle they were buried. This opinion may appear hard or
exaggerated, lots changed and became milder during the course of the
imprisonment . . . but the chronicles are not permitted to suppress that
such a remorseless rawness [rucksichtslose Roheit], lusty sensuality [geile
Sinnlichkeit], brutish overlordship [brutales Herrentum] was to be found
amongst the troops and civilians here that a full description is hardly
possible.161
Vedder, later a prominent Nazi, wrote in his memoir that at the camp:
During the worst period an average of thirty died daily . . . it was the way
that the system worked. General von Trotha publicly gave expression to
this system of murder through work in an article he published in the
Swakopmunder Zeitung: ‘the destruction of all rebellious tribes is the aim
of our efforts’.162
Mobile German South West African forced-labor camps may also have
 European History Quarterly, .

inspired similar Nazi institutions. The reality of these camps was communicated
to Germany through a variety of channels. Rust’s memoir included a full-page
photo depicting seven Herero prisoners working along a railroad line, under the
supervision of a white overseer. Some wear only loincloths or blankets; others are
dressed in rags. All are barefoot and emaciated, in contrast to the well-dressed,
pot-bellied overseer.163 Images like this conveyed a powerful message to German
readers, breaking down barriers to the development and acceptance of the Third
Reich slave labor system. The mobile work camps were catastrophic. Herero
Traugott Tjienda testified that of the 528 Hereros in his work party, 148 perished
while working on a railroad line.164 According to Erichsen, 67 per cent, or 1359 out
of 2014 forced laborers, died while building the Swakopmund railroad line
between January 1906 and June 1907.165
The first German concentration camp system took a terrible toll on its victims.
According to official German figures, of 15,000 Hereros and 2200 Namas incar-
cerated in camps, some 7700, or 45 per cent, perished.166 Given the camps’ role as
a focal point of domestic political debate, they likely exerted significant influence
on later Nazi leaders’ development of similar institutions. Linguistic parallels
strongly suggest that Nazi officials borrowed heavily from colonial Namibia in
creating their own death and work camp system. The Third Reich developed a
vastly larger, more efficient system, but ‘concentration camps’ were introduced
into German history and language through colonial Namibia.

Direct Personal Connections

Probably fewer than 40,000 Germans visited or lived in German South West
Africa prior to the rise of the Third Reich. It is therefore remarkable that out of a
country of 80 million, so many prominent Nazis had direct personal connections
to Wilhelmine Namibia. Zimmerer has suggested that ‘personal experiences are
one of the most obvious reception channels’ for the communication of colonial
ideas to Nazi Germany, but that ‘it is also one of the hardest ideas to grab hold
of’.167 Examining the lives of three Nazi leaders – Hermann Göring, Franz Ritter
von Epp, and Eugen Fischer – suggests that individuals served as conduits
through which colonial and genocidal ideas and methods were transferred from
German South West Africa to the leadership of the Third Reich.
As Hitler’s lieutenant, Hermann Göring helped plan Nazi Germany’s wars, led
the Luftwaffe, established Nazi Germany’s first concentration camps, and played
a major role in the colonial policies imposed on the occupied East. Göring grew up
surrounded by people intimately connected to German South West Africa. His
mother lived there from 1885 to 1891.168 His older brother was born there and
 Madley: From Africa to Auschwitz 

delivered by Doctor Hermann von Epenstein, who later became Hermann

Göring’s godfather and a pivotal figure in his life.169 Yet, it was Göring’s father’s
experience in the colony that most likely predisposed Hermann Göring toward
colonialism and empire building.
As a warrior and colonial administrator, Heinrich Göring left a potent legacy
upon which his son Hermann would build. In 1884, Otto von Bismarck pro-
claimed German possession of an enormous section of Africa stretching from the
Orange River, in the south, to the Kunene River in the north. To facilitate German
domination of the territory, Bismarck selected Doctor Heinrich Göring. Thus,
from 1885 to 1891, Hermann Göring’s father served as the first Reichskommissar
for German South West Africa, befriending Cecil Rhodes, suppressing African
revolts, deploying German troops, signing treaties, working to occupy hundreds
of thousands of square miles, and frequently flogging Africans.170 Although not
entirely successful in subduing Namibia’s African peoples, Doctor Göring estab-
lished a new colony that profoundly changed the region; until 26 January 1994, a
major boulevard in Namibia’s capital bore his name: Heinrich Göring Straße.171
Back in Germany, when Hermann Göring was three years old his father retired
and, with time on his hands, the father doted on his son. He allowed the boy to play
with the swords and caps of visiting military officers, regularly took Hermann to
Sunday military parades in Potsdam, and presented him with a Hussar’s uniform
at the age of five.172 Returning this paternal affection, the 20-year-old Hermann
wept openly at his father’s 1913 funeral.173
Göring’s authorized, official 1939 Nazi biography presented a son transfixed
by his father’s colonial exploits: ‘The inquisitive and imaginative lad was very
keenly interested in his father’s campaigning as a Reserve officer in the Wars of
1866 and 1870, but he was even more thrilled by his accounts of his pioneer work
as Reichs Commissar for South-West Africa . . . and his fights with Maherero, the
black King of Okahandja’.174 The biography went on to celebrate Doctor Göring’s
‘establish[ment] of the colony on a firm basis [as] a glorious chapter in German
colonial history’.175 Seven years after the publication of this biography, at his
Nuremberg trial, Göring listed ‘the position of my father as first Governor of
Southwest Africa’ as one of the four most important ‘points which are significant
with relation to my later development’.176 As he prepared to make this statement,
Göring had on his prison desk an old photo of his father in the uniform of the
German South West African Reichskommissar.177
From his father’s example, Hermann Göring learned that the conquest and
subjugation of non-Germans was a patriotic path to glory. In his own career, he
brought to the task an enthusiasm, scope, and brutality that dwarfed his father’s
mission. As early as 1933, Hermann Göring declared, ‘I do not have to exercise
 European History Quarterly, .

justice. I have only to annihilate and destroy [zu vernichten und auszurotten]’.178
His ferocious colonialist notions allowed him to predict that in 1941, ‘this
year between 20 and 30 million persons will die in Russia of hunger’ and then
to conclude, ‘perhaps it is as well that it should be so, for certain nations should be
decimated’.179 As head of the Four-Year Plan he emphasized wholesale theft;
speaking of his Eastern policy in 1942, Göring said, ‘I intend to plunder and do it
thoroughly’.180
Like Hermann Göring, German army officer Franz Ritter von Epp played a
major role in developing and promoting Nazi colonial ideas. However, while
Göring’s connection to German South West Africa was second-hand, von Epp
spent two years there, participating in the Herero genocide. He acted as a direct
human conduit through which German South West African ideas and methods
flowed into the highest echelons of the Third Reich. Von Epp employed and influ-
enced future Nazi leaders, played a crucial role in developing the Nazi Party, and
was a Third Reich leader until his 1945 capture by the US Army.
Arriving in German South West Africa on 1 March 1904, von Epp was in one of
the first waves of volunteer soldiers sent to suppress the Herero Uprising.181
Serving as a Company Commander, under von Trotha, von Epp led soldiers in a
number of operations against the Herero, including the decisive Battle of the
Waterberg and its genocidal aftermath.182 Von Epp was also in the colony during
the establishment of the concentration camps and did not leave until 1906.
Following military service in World War I, von Epp employed, influenced, and
nurtured numerous future Nazi leaders from successive positions of authority. In
February 1919, he formed the right-wing Freikorps Epp and led the unit in crush-
ing the revolutionary, socialist Bavarian Räterepublik before briefly installing
himself as dictator of Bavaria. Then, from late 1919 to 1928, he commanded the
Reichswehr’s new Battalion Epp, based in Munich.183
The list of men employed by von Epp following the First World War reads like
a who’s who of early Nazi leadership. Both Rudolf Hess, who later became Nazi
Party deputy leader, and Gregor Strasser, who later led the Nazi Party’s left wing,
served under von Epp. So did Walther Schultze, who as Nazi National Leader of
the Association of University Lecturers removed Jews from German university
posts and participated in the Nazi euthanasia program.184 Ernst Röhm, who
founded the SA, or Storm Troopers, served as the general’s aide-de-camp for nine
years.185 Von Epp’s influence on the early Nazi party may even explain how
Röhm’s SA became the ‘brown shirts’. In 1924, Hitler, Göring, Röhm and other
Nazi leaders chose to dress the party’s brown-shirted Storm Troopers in the same
colonial Schutztruppe uniform that von Epp had worn in German South West
Africa.186
 Madley: From Africa to Auschwitz 

Most importantly, von Epp influenced and nurtured Röhm’s then close friend,
Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler. Von Epp employed Hitler first as a paid informer
who, immediately following von Epp’s seizure of power in 1919, fingered com-
munist soldiers under von Epp’s command. Later, von Epp employed Hitler as an
‘educator’ charged with instilling nationalist and anti-Bolshevist sentiments in
the soldiers of the new Battalion Epp.187 It was while serving von Epp in this
capacity that, according to Ian Kershaw, Hitler ‘stumbled across his greatest
talent. As Hitler himself put it, he could “speak’’’.188 Von Epp thus helped launch
Hitler’s political career and likely steered the future dictator toward right-wing
politics; during this period both men joined the forerunner to the Nazi Party, the
tiny Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei, or German Workers’ Party.
Von Epp was a committed Nazi during the movement’s uncertain, early years.
In May 1928, he was elected to the Reichstag on the Nazi ticket along with
Gottfried Feder, Wilhelm Frick, Joseph Goebbels, and Gregor Strasser. He
entered the Reichstag as one of only a dozen Nazi delegates among 500 Reichstag
members.
As a Nazi leader, von Epp was deeply influenced by his military service in
German South West Africa and he, in turn, profoundly influenced Hitler’s colonial
policies. According to von Epp’s 1940 biography:
The experiences forged at this time [during the Namibian war and geno-
cide] live on. The result of the perhaps small, but in its execution delicate
and in its aftermath often bloody [episode], was the formation of a set of
projected colonial goals that have not been lost. The employment of these
goals in German colonial politics, and in the empire of Adolf Hitler, has
been made certain through Reichsleiter Ritter von Epp.189
Once in power, Hitler rewarded von Epp for his loyal work. On 10 April 1933,
Hitler appointed von Epp Governor of Bavaria, a position he held for 12 years.190
In Bavaria, he presided over the construction of Dachau, as well as the murder of
virtually all Bavarian Jews and Gypsies. On 5 May 1934, Hitler appointed him
Leiter, or head, of the Colonial Policy Office of the Nazi Party, a position from
which he helped to plan colonial policies.191 As Klaus Hildebrand has observed, in
1939, Hitler gave von Epp ‘responsibility for preparing and developing future
colonial plans and concerns’.192 Von Epp continued to serve the Third Reich
loyally until the very end, dying in US custody on 31 January 1947.193
Like von Epp, anthropologist Eugen Fischer played an important role in
developing and realizing Nazi colonial and genocidal ideas. Moreover, Fischer’s
personal experiences in German South West Africa shaped how he thought about
these issues. However, Fischer’s ideas focused less on colonialism than on racism,
 European History Quarterly, .

and whereas von Epp was indirectly involved in Nazi mass murder, Fischer was
intimately involved.
In 1908, while Herero and Nama were dying in concentration camps, Fischer
arrived in German South West Africa and began a pseudo-scientific study of 310
children. He aimed to gather two kinds of data from each child: physical charac-
teristics, like eye and hair color, and measurements of intelligence. Fischer then
compared these two data sets and fabricated correlations between physical traits
and intellectual acumen. The children Fischer studied were Basters, members of
an Afrikaans-speaking Namibian minority descended from intermarriage among
Boers, Britons, Germans, and Khoikhoin.194 His findings, published as Die
Rehobother Bastards in 1913, had a tremendous impact in Germany.195 According
to Henry Friedlander, ‘This study not only established [Fischer’s reputation] but
also influenced all subsequent German racial legislation, including the Nurem-
berg Laws’.196
Fischer argued that the offspring of interracial unions are of ‘lesser racial
quality’ and that his subjects’ cognitive abilities were inversely proportional to
their African physical characteristics.197 He continued: ‘Without exception, every
European people that has absorbed the blood of the inferior races – and that Negro
Hottentots, and many others are inferior is something that only dreamers can
deny – have paid for this absorption of inferior elements by intellectual and cul-
tural decline’.198 Fischer even hinted that genocide might be an appropriate
policy toward the Basters, if they lost their usefulness to the Germans:
One ought to give them the amount of protection that they need, as a race
inferior to us, so that their existence will last. They ought to be given no
more and it should only be for so long as they are useful to us. Otherwise
free competition, which means in my opinion, their extinction! This point
of view sounds almost brutally egotistical – but whosoever thinks all the
way through the previously described ‘psychological points’ [described in
the monograph] cannot be of any other opinion.199
That Fischer formulated such conclusions as a result of time spent in colonial
Namibia is hardly surprising. While Fischer played at science, the German Army
concluded the killing of some 40–70,000 Hereros and some 6–7000 Namas.200 In
the concentration camps, hundreds of post-mortems were conducted for the
purported study of the causes of death while the bodies of executed prisoners were
preserved, packed, and shipped to Germany for dissection.201
Drenched in racism, the colonial German community’s belief-system and its
involvement in racist pseudo-science probably influenced Fischer. Or, perhaps
Fischer simply borrowed from Germans in the colony. Colonial laws forbade
 Madley: From Africa to Auschwitz 

interracial unions and in 1905, a civil servant named Tecklenburg reported that,
‘Relationships between whites and natives will not strengthen the race, but only
weaken it. The offspring of such relationships are, as a rule, mentally and physi-
cally weak’.202 Settlers might also have given Fischer his idea that the Basters’
right to exist hinged upon their utility to Germans; a missionary named Elger
observed that, ‘The settler holds that the native has a right to exist only in so far as
he is useful to the white man.’203 Unfortunately, the concepts Fischer developed or
collected in German South West Africa helped shape one nation’s destiny and the
destruction of many others.
Fischer and the ideas in Die Rehobother Bastards directly influenced Hitler’s
own thinking on race and interracial mixing. As Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang
Wipperman argue, ‘it is certain that Hitler knew the most important racial
theories [including] the work of . . . Fischer.’204 Indeed, while writing Mein Kampf
in prison, Hitler was given a book co-authored by Fischer and two of his
employees.205 Hitler echoed Fischer’s ideas: ‘The result of all racial crossing is
therefore in brief always the following: (a) Lowering of the level of the higher race;
(b) Physical and intellectual regression and hence the beginning of a slowly but
surely progressing sickness.’206
In 1927, Fischer became director of the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for
Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics in Berlin. There he directed aca-
demics working in three fields of Rassenkunde, or racial studies: Racial Anthro-
pology, which he supervised, Human Heredity, which Othmar von Verschuer
directed, and Eugenics, supervised by Hermann Muckermann.207 Under the
Hitler regime, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute began producing scholarship intended
to support Nazi racial beliefs and goals. Fischer was particularly interested in
developing a biological justification for anti-Semitism. To this end, he fabricated a
substantial body of racist literature. For example, in collaborative work seeking
to prove the timeless origins of an imagined Jewish threat to civilization, co-
authored with theologian Gerhard Kittel, the two men argued that ‘always the
[Jewish] aim is: world domination . . . always and at all times, in the first century
as in the twentieth, world Jewry dreams of exclusive world domination on earth
and in the hereafter.’208 Fischer and his employees also helped build racist legisla-
tion and served on committees that developed laws excluding Jews, Gypsies, and
other ‘non-Aryans’ from German citizenship.209
Fischer used his position and authority to disseminate the ideas he had devel-
oped in colonial Namibia. He frequently lectured to large audiences, for example
delivering a speech to over 1000 people at the University of Cologne on 22 October
1936.210 Also, by training SS doctors and German medical students in eugenics
and ‘racial hygiene’, Fischer indoctrinated many of those responsible for promot-
 European History Quarterly, .

ing and perpetrating genocide. He also supported physicians directly involved in

mass murder and associated crimes against humanity. 211
Anthropologist Eva Justin, for example, was one of Fischer’s academic
protégés. Although Justin purported to study Gypsies, her work frequently led to
the sterilization and murder of her subjects. As Isabel Fonseca notes, ‘In her
influential reports, she recommended that full and part-Gypsies, including the
educated and assimilated, be sterilized; education of Gypsies was fruitless and
should be stopped. Often after one of her visits the interviewee and sometimes the
entire family would be removed to a camp.’212 The Gypsy children she studied for
her doctoral dissertation, for example, were all murdered at Auschwitz.213
SS Doctor Josef Mengele received training from Fischer’s Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute, became a member of the institute, and maintained a close relationship
with the organization while conducting his Auschwitz pseudo-research.214 While
at Auschwitz, the institute helped secure Mengele the grants that funded his
projects on eye-color, twins, and disease.215 Mengele then ‘sent the eyes of
murdered Gypsies, the internal organs of murdered children, and the sera of
others he had deliberately infected with typhoid back to the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute for analysis’, much as skull-filled chests had been sent to the Berlin
Pathological Institute from German South West African camps.216 He also regu-
larly communicated his findings to the institute and to his old graduate school
advisor, Othmar von Verschuer, who worked under Fischer from 1927 to 1935,
and in 1942, succeeded Fischer as head of the institute.217 Fischer and Mengele
were connected through von Verschuer, who maintained an active correspond-
ence with Fischer relating to the institute at least into November 1944, through the
period Mengele spent torturing and killing at Auschwitz.218 Realizing its incrimi-
nating nature, von Verschuer destroyed all correspondence between himself and
Mengele along with two truckloads of Kaiser Wilhelm Institute documents in
1945.219
Fischer himself acted on the conclusions he had reached in German South West
Africa to play two direct roles in programmatic Nazi racial violence. First, he
served as one of three scientists on the Gestapo’s ‘Special Commission Number
Three’ that planned and implemented ‘the discrete sterilization of Rheinland
bastards[Afro-Germans]’.220 Second, Fischer provided ‘scientific’ testimony on
the racial heritage of German citizens under investigation by the Nazi regime.
Some of those he deemed insufficiently ‘Aryan’ were later murdered as part of the
Nazi racial purification program.
Göring, von Epp, and Fischer were not the only Third Reich Germans con-
nected to German South West Africa. Indeed, the colonial Namibian experience
affected large swaths of Wilhelmine, Weimar and Nazi society, glorifying con-
 Madley: From Africa to Auschwitz 

quest and colonization while breaking down moral and political barriers to geno-
cide. Personal connections, literature, and public debates also communicated
colonialist and genocidal ideas and methods from the colony to Germany.
Hundreds of thousands of Germans knew or were related to the nearly 20,000
soldiers sent to the colony between 1904 and 1908. Literature also communicated
colonial ideas to hundreds of thousands of other Germans. The Herero and Nama
Uprisings and subsequent genocide also produced numerous Reichstag debates
and newspaper editorials that reached millions more. Indeed German South West
African colonialism, genocide and associated ideas were part of German domestic
discourse from 1904 until the rise of the Nazis. The Third Reich then cele-
brated the former colony with books, an enormous 16,600-ton ship christened
Windhuk,221 and even collectible cigarette packet cards romantically depicting
German rule in Namibia.222
The Third Reich love affair with the African Kaiserreich demonstrates that
the Hitler regime saw the former colonies as a model for their Eastern European
ambitions. In controlling and producing media, Nazis created a narrative in which
these former colonies supported Eastern European colonialism as a nostalgic
return, albeit geographically refocused, to a pre-Versailles normalcy in which
Germans ruled over vast areas populated by sub-humans. Literature celebrating
the African Kaiserreich flourished under the Nazis. Popular titles included Hugo
Blumhagen’s South West Africa Then and Now (1934), Rohrbach’s German
Africa, End or Beginning? (1935), The Book of German Colonies (1936), and Fritz
Spiesser’s Homecoming: a Novel of South African Germans (1943), which
was awarded several prizes by von Epp’s Reichskolonialbund.223 Cinema also
celebrated Germans in Africa. Some films, like the 1938 German Land in Africa,
and German Planters on Kilimanjaro, cultivated nostalgia for rule over docile
natives in a vast Lebensraum. Others, like Carl Peters (1941) and Germanin
(1943), attempted to justify anti-Semitism, colonialism, and German racial
superiority by using Germans in Africa as a screen on which to project propa-
ganda relevant to these themes.224 Nazis chose to celebrate the African Kaiserreich
because it so closely prefigured their own ideas and policies. Pro-Nazi audiences
accepted this propaganda because they thought of the African colonial project,
and its bloodiest, most populous settler colony – German South West Africa – in
admiring, nostalgic terms.
Nazi colonialism in Eastern Europe broadly followed patterns set in German
South West Africa not by chance, but because Germans in Wilhelmine Namibia
had pioneered the implementation of Lebensraum theory, the brutal treatment of
colonized people as sub-humans, and the use of legally institutionalized racism,
all of which were central to later Nazi rule in the East. Likewise, Third Reich
 European History Quarterly, .

leaders borrowed ideas and methods from the German South West African
genocide that they then employed and expanded upon. Genocidal rhetoric, a new
definition of Vernichtungskrieg, executing POWs, murdering civilians en masse,
and deporting POWs and noncombatants to work and death camps were all intro-
duced to modern German history through the Namibian colonial experience.
German South West Africa also set precedents that helped erode barriers to
brutal colonialism and genocide in Europe. As Zimmerer has suggested, ‘the
parallels’ between ‘the crimes of National Socialism’ and ‘colonialism . . . help
explain why the expulsion and resettlement of the Jews and Slavs, and ultimately
their murder, were not perceived as breaking a taboo’.225 Obstacles to these
policies still existed when Hitler came to power, but Nazis dismantled them.
Lothar von Trotha’s Schutztruppen were not the only antecedent to Reinhard
Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen. Nor was Shark Island the only precursor to
Auschwitz. The roots of Nazi ideas and policies range well beyond the German
South West African experience. However, connections can be drawn from the
colony to the Third Reich as one way of understanding the origins of Nazi imperi-
alism and mass murder in Eastern Europe. German South West Africa should
no longer be overlooked as an important antecedent to Nazi colonialism and
genocide.

Acknowledgement
The author is grateful to Rebecca Emerson, Casper Erichsen, Ute Frevert, Jan-Bart Gewald, Paul
Kennedy, Ben Kiernan, Wendy Lower, Dirk Moses, Browny Mutarifa, Sarah Philips, Hans-
Dietrich Schultz, Jan Simpson, Jörg Wassink, and Jürgen Zimmerer for encouragement,
references, and criticism of earlier drafts. They are responsible for neither his views nor his errors.

Notes
1. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York 1951).
2. Sven Lindquist, Joan Tate, trans. Exterminate All the Brutes (New York 1996); Enzo Traverso,
Janet Lloyd, trans. Origins of Nazi Violence (New York 2003); A. Dirk Moses, ‘Conceptual
Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the ‘Racial Century’, Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 36,
No. 4 (2002), 31.
3. Zimmerer has argued that, ‘the murder of the Jews . . . would probably not have been
thinkable and possible if the idea that ethnicities can simply be wiped out had not already
existed and had not already been put into action.’ Jürgen Zimmerer, Andrew H. Beattie, trans.
‘Colonialism and the Holocaust’, in A. Dirk Moses, ed., Genocide and Settler Society (New
York 2004a), 68.
4. Ibid., 64–5.
5. Isabel V. Hull, ‘Military Culture and the Production of “Final Solutions” in the Colonies’, in
Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan, eds, The Specter of Genocide (Cambridge, MA 2003),
141–62.
 Madley: From Africa to Auschwitz 

6. Alison Palmer, Colonial Genocide (Adelaide 2000), 149.

7. Maximilian Bayer, Mit dem Hauptquartier in Südwestafrika (Berlin 1909), 139.
8. Jon Bridgman, The Revolt of the Hereros (Berkeley, CA 1981), 111–12.
9. Estimates of the Herero population in 1904 vary widely.
10. Horst Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting (London 1980), 151.
11. For more information on confiscation of land and cattle see Robert Blake, A History of
Rhodesia (London 1977), 115, and Philip Mason, The Birth of a Dilemma (Oxford 1958), 188.
12. Terence Ranger, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia (Evanston, IL 1967), 131, 3.
13. Blake, op. cit., 136, 106.
14. For more information on land confiscation and alienation, see Shula Marks, Reluctant
Rebellion (Oxford 1970), 121.
15. Edgar Brookes and Colin Webb, History of Natal (Pietermaritzburg 1965), 224.
16. Shula Marks, ‘Class, Ideology, and the Bhambatha Rebellion’, in Donald Crummey, ed.,
Banditry, Rebellion and Social Protest in Africa (London 1986), 352.
17. Brookes and Webb, op. cit., 229.
18. Marks (1986), op. cit., 352.
19. Traverso, op. cit., 65; Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (London 1999), 233.
20. Joseph Conrad, Last Essays (London 1955), 17.
21. Traverso, op. cit., 67.
22. Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire (Durham, NC 2001), 94.
23. George Crothers, The German Elections of 1907 (London 1941), 36, 38.
24. Harriet Wanklyn, Friedrich Ratzel (Cambridge 1961), 84.
25. Woodruff Smith, ‘Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum’, German Studies Review,
Vol. III, No. 1 (February 1980), 54.
26. Friedrich Ratzel, ‘Der Lebensraum’, in Festgaben für Albert Schäffle (Tübingen 1901),
179–80.
27. Wanklyn, op. cit., 25.
28. ‘Die Aussichten unseres südwestafrikanischen Schutzgebietes,’ in Die Grenzboten, Vol. 51,
No. 4, 171–5.
29. Lindquist, op. cit., 144.
30. Ibid., 144.
31. Friedrich Ratzel, Das Meer als Quelle der Völkergröße (Munich 1900), op. cit.
32. Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Karl Haushofer (Boppard am Rhein 1979), 239; Ian Kershaw, Hitler:
1889–1936 (New York 1999), 249.
33. Helmut Bley, ‘Social Discord in South West Africa’, in Prosser Gifford and William Lewis,
eds, Britain and Germany in Africa (New Haven, CT 1966), 611.
34. Curt von François, Deutsch-Südwest-Afrika (Berlin 1899), 49.
35. Gerhardus Pool, Maharero (Windhoek 1990), 117.
36. Paul Rohrbach, Deutsche Kolonialwirtschaft, I (Berlin 1907), 282.
37. John Wellington, South West Africa (Oxford 1967), 194.
38. Kershaw, op. cit., 249, 288.
39. Josef Krumbach, Franz Ritter von Epp (Munich 1940), 249.
40. Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop, eds, The Imperialist Imagination
(Ann Arbor, MI 1998), 16; Robert Wistrich, Who’s Who in Nazi Germany (New York 1982),
107.
41. Ritter von Epp, ‘Introduction’, in H. Blumhagen, Südwestafrika (Berlin 1934), 5.
 European History Quarterly, .

42. Quoted in Krumbach, op. cit., 255.

43. Adolf Hitler, Ralf Mannheim, trans., Mein Kampf (Boston, MA 1943),138.
44. Ibid., 643.
45. Ibid., 646.
46. Ibid., 652.
47. German Foreign Office, Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–1945, Vol. VI (London
1956), 575.
48. Istvan Deak, The Politics of Retribution in Europe (Princeton, NJ 2000), 25–6.
49. Reinhard Heydrich, ‘The Final Solution’, in Brian Macarthur, ed., The Penguin Book of
Twentieth Century Speeches (New York 2000), 208–9.
50. Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich (New York 2001), 439.
51. Hitler, op. cit., 138; Hitler, quoted in A. Duff Cooper, The Nazi Claims to Colonies (London
1939), 53.
52. Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Geburt des “Ostlandes” aus dem Geiste des Kolonialismus’, Sozial
Geschichte (February 2004b), 40–1.
53. Theodore Leutwein, Elf Jahre Gouverneur in Deutsch Südwestafrika (Berlin 1907), 415;
Heinrich Vedder, Cyril Hall, trans. and ed., South West Africa (London 1966), 229.
54. Maximilian Bayer, Der Krieg in Südwestafrika (Leipzig 1906), 11.
55. Israel Goldblatt, History of South West Africa (Capetown 1971), 147; Rohrbach (1907), op.
cit., 349.
56. Leutwein, op. cit., 223.
57. H. Hanemann, Wirtschaftliche Verhältnisse in Südwestafrika (Berlin 1905), 46.
58. Bayer, op. cit., 98, 200.
59. Erich von Salzmann, Im Kampfe gegen die Herero (Berlin 1912), 186–7.
60. Conrad Rust, Krieg und Frieden im Hererolande (Berlin 1905), 196.
61. Quoted in Jan-Bart Gewald, Herero Heroes (Athens 1999), 190.
62. Casper W. Erichsen, ‘The Angel of Death Has Descended Violently Among Them’,
unpublished MA thesis (Windhoek 2004), 187.
63. Peter Katjavivi, A History of Resistance in Namibia (Paris 1988), 9.
64. Wendy Lower, ‘German Colonialism and Genocide’, unpublished paper presented at the
Conference of Colonial Genocide, Sydney, Australia, June 2003, 16.
65. Helmut Bley, Hugh Ridley, trans., South West Africa Under German Rule (Evanston, IL
1971), 139–40.
66. Paul Rohrbach, Edmund von Mach, trans., German World Policies (New York 1915), 57, 135.
67. Quoted in John Noyes, ‘National Identity, Nomadism, and Narration’, in Friedrichsmeyer,
Lennox and Zantop, op. cit., 95–6.
68. Bley, op. cit., 165; Jürgen Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft über Afrikaner (Münster 2000), 85.
69. Martyn Housden, Hans Frank, Lebensraum and the Final Solution (New York 2003), 122.
70. Martin Gilbert, The Second World War (New York 1991), 19.
71. Quoted in Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, trans., Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944 (New
York 2000), 33.
72. Alan Bullock, Hitler (New York 1962), 697.
73. Traverso, op. cit., 72, 161.
74. Quoted in Karel Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair (Cambridge 2004), 309.
75. Bley, op. cit., 140.
76. David Soggot, Namibia (London 1986), 7.
 Madley: From Africa to Auschwitz 

77. Drechsler (1980), op. cit., 136.

78. Wildenthal, op. cit., 79.
79. Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge 2003), n.47, 319.
80. Wildenthal, op. cit., 84, 87–8.
81. Helmut W. Smith, ‘Talk of Genocide’, in Friedrichsmeyer, Lennox and Zantop, op. cit.,
116–22.
82. Quoted in Sabine Hake, ‘Mapping the Human Body’, in Friedrichsmeyer, Lennox and
Zantop, op. cit., 176.
83. Kershaw, op. cit., 563, 564.
84. Koonz, op. cit., 25, 116, 171, 180.
85. Zimmerer (2004a), op. cit., 57.
86. Kershaw, op. cit., 565, 564.
87. Pool, op. cit., 1.
88. Leutwein, op. cit., 466.
89. Ibid., 467; Bridgman, op. cit., 69.
90. Horst Drechsler, Südwestafrika unter Deutscher Kolonialherrschaft (Berlin 1966), 169.
91. Ibid., 168.
92. Drechsler (1980), op. cit., 141–2.
93. Smith, op. cit., 107–8.
94. Crothers, op. cit., 110.
95. Doktor Hartmann, Die Zunkunft Deutsch-Suedwestafrikas (Berlin 1904), 21.
96. Kurt Schwabe, Der Krieg in Deutsch-Südwestafrika (Berlin 1907), 300.
97. Rohrbach (1907), op. cit., 350.
98. Rohrbach (1915), op. cit., 141, 135.
99. According to Michael Burleigh, in the East ‘the Nazis imagined they had a tabula rasa’.
Burleigh, op. cit., 427–8.
100. Claudia Koonz has traced the Nazi use of this phrase. Koonz, op. cit., n2, 277.
101. Ibid., 254, 252.
102. Zimmerer has noted parallels between the killing of POWs and civilians in German South
West Africa and in occupied Eastern Europe. Zimmerer (2000b), op. cit., 27.
103. Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Krieg, KZ und Völkermord in Südwestafrika,’ in Jürgen Zimmerer and
Joachim Zeller, eds. Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika (Berlin 2003), 58.
104. Tilman Dedering, ‘A Certain Rigorous Treatment’, in Mark Levene and Penny Roberts, eds,
The Massacre in History (New York 1999), 208.
105. Hull, op. cit., 154.
106. Drechsler (1980), op. cit. 163, 165; John Bridgman and Leslie J. Worley, ‘Genocide of the
Hereros’, in Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons, and Israel W. Charney, eds, Century of
Genocide (New York 1995), 18–19; Gesine Krüger, Kriegsbewältigung und
Geschichtebewusstein (Göttingen 1999) 65–6.
107. Pool, op. cit., 251.
108. Generalstab, ed., Die Kämpfe der deutschen Truppen in Südwestafrika, I (Berlin 1906),
132.
109. Reprinted in Rust, op. cit., 385.
110. Generalstab, op. cit., 211.
111. Ibid., 214.
112. Rust, op. cit., 385.
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113. Hamburg Institute for Social Research, ed., Paula Bredish, trans., The German Army and
Genocide (New York 1999), 23.
114. Norman Rich, Hitler’s War Aims, II (London 1974), 74.
115. Anthony Beevor, Stalingrad (New York 1999), 15.
116. Richard Overy, Russia’s War (New York 1997), 84.
117. Quoted in Drechsler (1980), op. cit., 152.
118. Administrator’s Office, Windhuk, ed., Report on the Natives of South-West Africa and their
Treatment by Germany (London 1918), 64. Jan-Bart Gewald and Jeremy Silvester argue
persuasively for the authenticity of the Report’s testimony. Jan-Bart Gewald and Jeremy
Silvester, Words Cannot Be Found (Boston, MA 2003), Introduction.
119. Administrator’s Office, Report, 65.
120. Von Salzmann, op. cit., 94; Generalstab, op. cit., 186.
121. Gewald, op.cit., 197.
122. Quoted in Pool, op. cit., 293.
123. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent (New York 1998), 168.
124. Christian Streit, ‘The Fate of Soviet Prisoners of War’, in Michael Berenbaum, A Mosaic of
Victims (New York 1990), 142.
125. Generalstab, op. cit., 186.
126. Bridgman, op. cit., 126, For post-battle massacres, see Drechsler (1980), op. cit., 157.
127. Administrator’s Office, Report, 63.
128. Richard Lukas, ‘The Polish Experience during the Holocaust’, in Berenbaum, op. cit., 95.
129. Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Occupied Russia (New York 1957), 278.
130. US Office of Chief of Counsel, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, IV (Washington, DC
1946), 427.
131. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men (New York 1998), 11.
132. Ibid., 10.
133. Pool, op. cit., 270.
134. Hull, op. cit., 156.
135. Administrator’s Office, Report, 65.
136. US Office of Chief of Counsel, op. cit., 572–8.
137. Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors (New York 1986), 148.
138. Ibid., 477.
139. Smith, op. cit., 111, 113.
140. Ibid., 112, 118.
141. Drechsler (1980), op. cit., 214–16; Bley, op. cit., 170–3, 226–48.
142. Schwabe, op. cit., 306.
143. Walter Nuhn, Sturm über Südwest (Bonn 1997), 351.
144. For a history of the concentration camp see Andrzej J. Kaminski, Konzentrationslager 1896
bis heute: eine Analyse (Stuttgart 1982).
145. Smith, op. cit., 111.
146. Casper W. Erichsen, ‘Namibia’s Island of Death’, New African, No. 421
(August/September, 2003), 49.
147. Zimmerer has suggested that German South West African camps ‘show the beginnings of a
bureaucratic form of annihilation in camps, along with growing degrees of organization, even
though such active, industrial killing as we saw after 1941 in the Nazi annihilation camps
was not yet in existence.’ Zimmerer (2004b), op. cit., 32.
 Madley: From Africa to Auschwitz 

148. Quoted in Erichsen (2004), op. cit., 147.

149. Quoted in Zimmerer (2000), op. cit., 46–7.
150. Erichsen (2003), op. cit., 49.
151. Erichsen (2004), op. cit., 198.
152. Administrator’s Office, op. cit., 99.
153. Erichsen (2003), op. cit., 314–15.
154. Ibid.,312.
155. Drechsler (1980), op. cit., 212.
156. Erichsen (2004), op. cit., 169.
157. Smith, op. cit., 113. Kershaw, op. cit., 289.
158. Smith, op. cit., 113.
159. Zimmerer (2004b), op. cit., 25.
160. Gewald (1999), op. cit., 189.
161. Ibid., 188.
162. Heinrich Vedder, Kurze Geschichten (Wuppertal-Barmen 1953), 139.
163. Rust, op. cit., 443.
164. Administrator’s Office, op. cit., 101–2.
165. Erichsen (2003), op. cit., 48.
166. Bley, op. cit., 151.
167. Zimmerer (2004b), op. cit., 33.
168. Asher Lee, Goering (New York 1972), 12, 14.
169. Charles Bewley, Hermann Göring (New York 1962), 12; Mosley, The Reich Marshal (New
York 1974), 17.
170. Kurt Singer, Göring (London 1940), 18.
171. Browny Mutarifa, of the Windhoek City Council, generously provided this information.
172. Lee, op. cit., 12.
173. Ibid., 14.
174. Erich Gritzbach, Gerald Griffin, trans., Hermann Goering (London 1939), 222.
175. Ibid., 223, 224.
176. http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/proc/03–13–46.htm#Goering1
177. Bewley, op. cit., 241.
178. Koonz, op. cit., 35.
179. Galeazzo Ciano, Malcolm Muggeridge, ed., Stuart Hood, trans., Ciano’s Diplomatic Papers
(London 1948), 465.
180. Trial of the Major War Criminals, IX (Buffalo 1995), 633.
181. Krumbach, op. cit., 186.
182. Wolfgang Benz, Hermann Graml and Hermann Weiß, Enzyklopädie des
Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart 1997), 833; Krumbach, op. cit., 206–7.
183. Wistrich, op. cit., 67.
184. Ibid., 130, 302, 280.
185. Gerald Reitlinger, The SS (New York 1957), 475.
186. Martin Baer and Olaf Schröter, Eine Kopfjagd (Berlin 2001), 156–7.
187. Wistrich, op. cit., 67, 146; Kershaw, op. cit., 120, 174.
188. Kershaw, op. cit., 124.
189. Krumbach, op. cit., 241–2.
190. Kershaw, op. cit., 469.
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191. Benz, Graml and Weiß, op. cit., 547, 833.

192. Quoted in Baer and Schröter, op. cit., 164.
193. Wistrich, op. cit., 68.
194. Peter Carstens, Introduction, in Maximilian Bayer, Peter Carstens, trans. and ed., The
Rehoboth Baster Nation (Basel 1984), 4.
195. Eugen Fischer, Die Rehobother Bastards (Jena 1913).
196. Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide (Chapel Hill, NC 1995), 11.
197. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State (Cambridge 1991), 38.
198. Fischer, op. cit., 302.
199. Ibid., 302.
200. Drechsler (1980), op. cit., 151.
201. Gewald (1999), op. cit., 189–90, n.256.
202. Zimmerer (2000), op. cit., 99–100.
203. Drechsler (1966), op. cit., 349.
204. Burleigh and Wippermann, op. cit., 37–8.
205. Friedlander, op. cit., 13.
206. Hitler, op. cit., 286.
207. Friedlander, op. cit., 12–13.
208. Koonz, op. cit., 200; Max Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors (New Haven, CT 1999), 216–17.
209. Friedlander, op. cit., 25.
210. Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between Unification and Nazism
(Cambridge 1989), 502.
211. Burleigh and Wippermann, op. cit., 53; Koonz, op. cit., 107; Weindling, op. cit., 553.
212. Isabel Fonseca, Bury Me Standing (London 1995), 258.
213. Friedlander, op. cit. 251.
214. Gerald L. Posner and John Ware, Mengele (New York 2000), 14.
215. Ibid., 12.
216. Burleigh and Wippermann, op. cit., 54; Lifton, op. cit., 361.
217. Lifton, op. cit., 357.
218. Weindling, op. cit., 564.
219. Posner and Ware, op. cit., 41, 59.
220. Clarence Lusane, Hitler’s Black Victims (New York 2002), 139.
221. Das Buch der deutschen Kolonien (Leipzig 1937), 18; S.D. Waters, The Royal New Zealand
Navy (Wellington 1956), 36.
222. Cigaretten-Bilderdienst Dresden, Deutsche Kolonien (Dresden 1936).
223. Hugo Blumhagen, Südwestafrika (Berlin 1934); Paul Rohrbach, Deutsch-Afrika (Potsdam
1935); Buch der deutschen Kolonien; Fritz Spiesser, Heimkehr (Munich 1943); Hake, op. cit.,
n.5, 170.
224. This interpretation of Nazi cinema is borrowed from the work of Sabine Hake. See Hake,
op. cit., 163–87.
225. Zimmerer (2004a), op. cit., 68.

benjamin madley is currently completing a PhD in History at Yale University.