The planned and systematic massacre of the Herero and Nama peoples in Germany’s South West African Empire in the early years of the 20th century has been largely forgotten. Yet, as David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen write in their book The Kaiser’s Holocaust, “years later, the soldiers and bureaucrats who had administered the concentration camps in Southern Africa, and the racial theories that had inspired them, would play a role in the formation of Nazism” and therefore in the conception and implementation of the Holocaust.
The death camps were invented on Shark Island, in Lüderitz, a sea town on the edge of the Namib desert. But even today, as the authors report, “it remains a secret. The tourist information office on Bismarck Strasse has nothing to say on the subject, none of the guidebooks to Namibia mention it and most of the history books they recommend as further reading are similarly mute”.
Silence and denial
The story of these massacres was hidden in the Reich archives and therefore the memory of these atrocities could not act as a warning nor as a deterrent against the emergence of new genocides against other peoples. Ignorance has always been the companion of indifference and historical imprudence.
This book is a must read for all those who want to understand how “silence” during the preparation and execution of a genocide and then amnesia and denial are constant patterns of what Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has called “eliminationism”.
There is a continuity between the Herero, the Armenian and the Jewish genocides. There is even a continuity in the fact that perpetrators go from one atrocity to another. Curt von François, the German captain that led the first unit of German colonial soldiers in South West Africa in 1889, had been a mercenary at the service of Belgium’s King Leopold II, whose brutal exploitation of the “Free State of Congo” has become, thanks to Adam Hochschild’s exposé “King Leopold’s Ghosts”, a synonym of cruelty, rapine and murder. “A surprising number of the most important figures” in the far-right Freikorps movements in post-First World War “had also taken part on the genocides against the Hereros and Nama”.
The failure of the media
As the object of our blog is to analyze the role of the media, we will not go further into the presentation of a very rich book full of historical insight in order to quickly highlight the role of the media during and after the first genocide of the century.
The “burial” of such a brutal event in the deep pits of “non-news” is in fact an indictment of most of the media. When the Herero and Nama rebelled against the German rulers the right wing press agitated in favor of brutal retaliation. "They set out to portray the Herero as savages, many newspapers carried reports of atrocities -most exaggerated, some entirely fabricatedc- claiming that children had been killed, that white women had been raped". In an armosphere of war fever, "few people dared to challenge the accuracy of the reports from the colony".
Other media just did not take the measure of the violence and the insanity of the German occupies. Why? Bcause these atrocities were carried out against a small “backward” population thousands of miles away from Europe; because, at the height of the colonization era, extermination, as famously denounced by Swedish writer Sven Linqvist, was the norm or considered a natural and inevitable side effect of progress and civilization.
The failure of the media was compounded by the fact that very soon most of them forgot these atrocities. Even today most journalists still appear to ignore this awful and ominous precedent of the Nazis' exterminationist policies.
One of the other interesting contributions of the book is that it provides a vivid description of the imperialist, nationalist and racist culture that formed the context of the ideology of mass killing. The failure of the media indeed was not limited to their lack of reporting. Many of them, expressing “the spirit of the times”, also actively and uncritically relayed this genocidal culture to the German public.
Some German media, like the Socialist newspaper Koenigsberger Volkszeitung, did report on the extermination but they were marginal to a German political debate dominated by Völkisch and racialist ideas. A few South African newspapers, like the Cape Argus, ran stories on the “German operations in Lüderitz but these articles did not resonate where it mattered, in Berlin. They were picked up however by the British media during the First World War. Eager to denounce their enemies’ barbarity they reminded their readers, as The Times did on 10 July 1915, that “the war against the Herero had tarnished Germany as with lasting disgrace”.
The book: David Olusoga & Casper W. Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust. Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism, Faber and Faber, London, 2010, 394 pages.
