ResoluteReader: David Olusoga & Casper W. Erichsen - The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide

Saturday, September 06, 2025

David Olusoga & Casper W. Erichsen - The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide

In the late nineteenth century Germany was straining at the boundaries of its borders. Most of the Global South had been carved up by European powers. Britain, France, Italy all had their Empires. German capitalists needed more markets and more natural resources. They too wanted an empire that they could subjegate and pillage, like the other industrial powers. Five thousand miles from Germany, Namibia was to become the African country were German empire building began, and it became an experiment in racist control, genocidal war and colonial rule. The consequences for the people of Namibia, tribes like the Herero, Tibooi Nama and Bethanie Nama was appalling.

David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen's remarkable history is a study of this history. But they are making a wider argument. What happened in Nambia was a trial for the Holocaust and the Nazis. As the authors say:

What Germany's armies and civilian administrators did in Namibia is today a lost history, but the Nazis knew it well. When the Schutztruppe attempted to exterminate the Herero and Nama peoples of Namibia a century ago, Hitler was a schoolboy of fifteen. In 1904, he lived in a continent that was electrified by the stories of German geroism and African barbarism emanating from what was then German South-West Africa.

Indeed Hitler was "closely associated" with one of the leading figures in the genocide. When Hitler joined the ranks for the far-right in 1922, it was "under the command of the charismatic Gerneral Franz von Epp, a violent, racist, military leader who firmly believed in "lebensraum". One of the startling things about this book is how words that readers will associated with the Nazi Holocaust during the Second World War were first used in Nambia in the 1900s. Lebensraum was a term coined to justify the need of Germany to expand and build colonies. Konzentrationslager, the German translation of the English term Concentration Camp - first used in the Boer War - was used to describe the slave-labour camps in Namibia.

When "war" broke out between the German military and the Namibian people, it took place on racial lines:

From the start, the outburst of intense fury againt the Herero was channelled and manipulated by an array of nationalist and pro-colonial societies. Along with the right-wing press, they set out to portray the Herero as savages, their uprising motivated by innate brutality. Ignoring the facts, they repeatedly claimed that the Herero had launched an indiscriminate racial war and that, as savages, they fought without restraint. Many newspapers also carried reports of atrocities - most exaggerated, some entirely fabricated - claiming that a number of German children had been killed, that white women had been raped and that some of the male settlers who had been killed had had their noses and testicles cut off.

The racial war against the Nambian people was carried out in the brutal fashion. Those in command were imbued with hardened nationalist and racist views. On his way to Africa, von Epp wrote, "The world is being divided... With time we will inevitably need more space; only by the sword will we be able to get it. It will be up to our generation to achieve this. It is a matter of existence."

But least that we conclude this was only a German problem, note that another volunteer for action in Namibia, "regarded the recent history of the United States as a model of how Germany might transform her own colonial frontiers". Economic "development" in the colony went alongside the "extermination of the Herero and Nama peoples". The camps were sources of slave labour for the colony, including for industrial corporations as well as individual families. But, it is crucial to emphasise, they were not work camps. Writing about one of the colony's heads, von Lindequist, the authors contrast the British in South Africa with Germany in Namibia:

Von Lindequist's promise to the Herero - that their suffering in the concentration camps might come to an end if their 'compatriots, who are still in the bush' surredered - bears the hallmarks of Kichener's earlier strategy. Yet there was one crucial difference. In the Boer War the concentration camps had been part of a strategy aimed at ending an ongoing insurgency. In German South-West Africa, the Herero were defeated when von Linsequist took command. As he admitted in mid-1906, they had no ability and no desire to fight. The concentration camps were not part of a military strategy.

The "defeat" however of the Namibian tribes came at a cost for Germany. Indeed the most inspiring chapters of The Kaiser's Holocaust are the remarkable story of the extended, guerilla war that fought the German army to a standstill. A war that was not marked by atrocity on the part of the Nama and Herero people, but rather the opposite. The Namibian fighters in fact treated women and children with kindness and did not arbitarily kill or rape them. Their warfare was directed against the male settlers and the army sent against them. Its a remarkable story of rebellion and war, against a foe unable to imagine that poorly armed black people were able to fight them to a standstill.

But eventually, by subterfuge and starvation, the Namibians were defeated. Led into concentration camps while being promised peace and relocation, they were taken to brutal torture and death. The lessons from German South-West Africa taught a new generation of far-right nationalists. Events in African were a blueprint for the Nazis own behaviour:

Soldiers and scientists whose careers began on the pastoral deserts of South-West Africa or in the killing fields of East Africa, Togo and Cameroon were to play leading roles in the Nazi tragedy.

and

When designing the lasws needed to create the 'racial state'... the Nazis found a number of definiations and legal precedents, along with a whole lexicon of racial terminology, in legislation passed in Germany's former colonies.

The authors also show how the pattern that led to the "Kaiser's Holocaust" was also repeated in Eastern Europe as the needs of their racist programmes clased with the military needs of the Nazi economy:

The desire to exterminate or expel their racial enemies ran counter to a growing and desperate need for labour and concerns for the well-being of the fighting men. Tese contradictions were never fully solved, but as in South-West Africa, one solution was the creation of forced labour camps in which labour becames a means of liquidation.

David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen's book is a remarkable piece of history. It rescues a forgotten period of colonialism from deliberate obscurity. It reminds us again of the bloody reality of colonial rule, and it shows how Nazi ideology has a long and terrible antecedent. But it tells us something else. Reading this book at the same time as the Israeli state continued its murderous assault on the people of Gaza, the book reminds us that settler colonialism always rests on racist ideas and can have genocidal conclusions. If there is one other thing to remember, with this in mind, it is that the resistance of the people of South-West Africa was brave and principled, and that in Germany at least a minority on the left did seek to highlight and stop the war. Tragically that was not enough to stop the Kaiser's Holocaust. This book is an essential read for anyone trying to understand twentieth, and twenty-first, century history.