David Olusoga on The Kaiser’s Holocaust
In The Kaiser’s Holocaust, David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen give us the unknown story of the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples in Germany’s forgotten African empire – an atrocity that foreshadowed the Nazi genocides. It’s an important book and a fascinating – and often grim – read. Here is David Olusoga introducing it, putting the events into a wider context.
The story of the extermination of the Herero and Nama was not so much forgotten as deliberately written out of official history. It is a story that was entombed, initially by the German colonial authorities and later by the South Africans who replaced them. In the decades after the genocide, up until the end of South African rule and the birth of modern Namibia in 1990, no group with any power in the country had any vested interest in the story being exhumed.
The German community sought to deny what their nation and their ancestors had done in the Camps and in the Omahake, while the South Africans, covered-up the genocides in the name of white unity. Both groups, along with the Pretoria governments, who ruled over South West Africa as a virtual province of South Africa, set out to expunge the genocide from official history of the country. All were content to conceal this history behind a semi-mythical version of the nation’s past, that both the German and South African populations of South West Africa could rally behind.
Containing a great deal of new archival research, The Kaiser’s Holocaust will help this history to break-out to a new and wider audience. The book also offers a detailed account of the genocides but especially of the concentration camps placing them within the wider context of German and European history, challenging the notion that events that took place with the colonial realm had little impact upon European history.
The excellent national archives in Namibia still contain large numbers of files and photographs through which the real story can be pieced together.
There is a view shared by some historians of this event that the openness of the soldiers and administrators who filled the death registers, took photographs of the dying and who wrote letters offering human remains for sale simply felt there was no need to hide what they were doing, at the personal level, as they did not believe it was wrong. They were also confident that the direction of history would demonstrate them to have been right and that the suffering of the people they enslaved and exterminated would never be deemed valuable enough to be explored by historians. What the letters and documents in the archives reveal is this incredible openness but also that unsettling combination of killing and cold bureaucracy that is so redolent of the world’s other systemic genocides – the Nazi death camps and the Soviet GULAG.
What is most uncomfortable about the history explored by The Kaiser’s Holocaust is that it challenges the theory that the Nazis and their crimes were an historical aberration. The book argues that the Herero Nama genocide, and the German genocides in the East during World War Two, were both part of a much larger phenomenon; the rise in Germany of a form of racial colonialism, informed by a radical interpretation of Social Darwinism and founded upon the 19th-century Lebensraum Theory. While the extermination of the Jews was motivated, above all, by Nazi anti-Semitism even that holocaust took place within the context of the Nazis’ war for space and empire.
The racial theories that motivated the extermination of millions of Poles, Russian, Ukrainians and others were steeped in the traditions and theories of late 19th-century racial colonialism.
David Olusoga
