“Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men the most.” ― Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War

Renowned Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz defined war as “an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfil our will.”1 Given Germany’s martial legacy, it should come as no surprise that a Prussian general penned those words. Baron Antoine-Henri Jomini, a Swiss officer and contemporary of Clausewitz, expounded upon the definition of war when he stated, “The most just war is one founded on undoubted rights.”2 Jomini felt that public (civilian) interest must be considered before resorting to military action. Unfortunately, most Western powers have failed to heed Jomini’s dictum and have instead placed their own interests before those of the public. As a result, many millions of innocent civilians have perished because of state-sponsored war.

Right: General Lothar von Trotha.

Nevertheless, agreements like the Hague and Geneva Conventions were drafted around the turn of the twentieth century to protect non-combatants during state-sponsored war. And while the implementation of such agreements may have evoked a sense of progressive civility amongst the signatories, man’s proclivity towards violence has largely consigned these conventions to the realm of “good intentions.” Actions speak louder than words on paper, and history bears out centuries of atrocities perpetrated upon non-combatants in time of war.

Although not typically thought of as Europe’s first “total war,” the Thirty Years' War (1618-48) provides what is certainly an early example of this phenomenon. Civilian women were raped, children murdered, and entire population centers denuded as rapacious soldiers stormed their way through Central Europe. The terminus of the Thirty Years' War created unlikely alliances and forever altered the geopolitical landscape of much of Europe. Ironically, the alteration of that landscape recognized the sovereign independent authority of several German princes, one of whom was Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg.3 Over time, Frederick’s German descendants would forge a national militarism that would endure through African colonialism, the Great War, and World War II, leaving countless civilians dead in their wake. A convincing argument can thus be made that the German atrocities that reached their apogee in Hitler’s Final Solution began years earlier in the dry grasslands of Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia).

Considering the butcher’s bill racked up in Southwest Africa (SWA), Belgium, Poland, and Russia, one struggles to understand how a nation that produced a Beethoven, a Siemens, and an Einstein could descend to a level of ruthlessness and cruelty that earned them the reputation of Attila’s Huns. Indeed, in his pamphlet, German Atrocities (1915), William Le Queux asserts that the “ruthless and utterly inexcusable barbarities committed by the German army were surely without parallel in the whole history of the world.”4 How could the German military, nurtured from the precision genius of Frederick the Great, succumb to wanton butchery, torture, and the denigration of whole races of people? As Mark Twain is oft reputed to have said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”5

Anyone even remotely familiar with the Holocaust and the fall of the Third Reich would agree that something sinister fueled Nazi Germany’s goal of ridding Europe of the Jews. What began as breaking the windows out of Jewish businesses culminated in an orgy of perverse violence that has left an indelible stain, the likes of which Germany can never erase. It has become painfully obvious that hatred for a particular people group (Jews) is what motivated Hitler’s Wehrmacht to commit the deplorable acts for which they are known. 

In searching for a blueprint for Germany’s war methodology during World War II, one need look no further than the pages of Mein Kampf.6 Throughout the nearly 800 pages of Hitler’s tome, he framed the ideology that would characterize his Third Reich, and he trumpeted accusations that Jews and Marxists were to blame for all of Germany’s misfortunes and therefore stood in the way of her economic, political, and geographic expansion.7 This ideology became the justification that Germany’s military leadership embraced and employed to murder countless non-combatants throughout the early 1940s.

Although pervasive at the highest levels of Nazi leadership, one is hard-pressed to understand how the lowly German soldier, a young man barely old enough to shave, could blindly follow the perverted ethos of the Nazi thugs who led Germany into eternal infamy. Certainly, not every German soldier espoused a racial hatred towards Jews, and not every German soldier was a ‘card-carrying’ Nazi. However, there were obviously enough that were, and those young men teetering on the fence were easily swayed. In Masters of Death: The SS- Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (2003), Richard Rhodes argues that the “violent socialization process,” as theorized by American criminologist Lonnie Athens, explains how seemingly ordinary men could perpetrate the horrors of war.8 Essentially, Rhodes argues that people become violent by choice, not by chance.

Right: At a Rally in Nazi Germany, 1930s. Source: War History Network license.

In a similar vein, Christopher R. Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1998) presents certain psychological studies, such as Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment and Milgram’s obedience to authority study to show how ordinary humans can be pressured into committing violence against innocent victims simply because they do not wish to be viewed as a nonconformist.9 Browning explains that adopting nonconformist behavior was simply beyond most of the men in the German army. For those few who adamantly refused to shoot innocent civilians, they subjected themselves to an asocial dilemma. By opting out of genocidal murder, they effectively cast their burden upon their comrades.

Browning refers to this as their refusal to share in an unpleasant collective obligation, resulting in isolation, ostracism, and rejection by the very comrades they looked to for support and social contact.10 Given a similar situation, ordinary men rarely rise to the occasion, but rather sink to the lowest common denominator of human behavior, and this choice to become violent, as pertaining to the German army of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, had its roots in Germany’s colonization of SWA in 1884.

Imperial Germany was a relative latecomer to 19th-century colonialism. This was largely due to the fragmentation of various German states, which unified in 1871 following the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1). Once Germany became a bona fide empire, nationalism fueled the grab for global markets for the emerging nation. In fact, one of the leading proponents for German colonialism was German economist Friedrich List. In 1834, List founded the Zollverein customs union to ensure Germany would not become subservient to British manufacturing. He argued that the future success of German trade lay in the “possession of colonies.”11

In an effort to retard England’s expanding colonial holdings, Germany’s Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, invited the European powers to the Berlin Conference in 1884 to settle competing claims over the Congo and West Africa. The outcome of this conference mandated that any European occupation of African territory must be based on an effective occupation that was recognized by other states, and no single European power could lay claim to the entire African continent. Like ravens descending on road kill, various European powers scrambled to annex portions of the Dark Continent for their imperialistic gains.12 Germany ended up with SWA, Cameroon, Togo, and East Africa.13

Right: European officials staking claims to Africa in the Conference of Berlin in 1884. Source: Wikimedia.

The manner in which the German Empire ruled its foreign colonies was not that different from the British, French, and Americans. In fact, violence was an ongoing component of colonial rule.14 Moreover, this violence nearly always reflected a high degree of asymmetry in its military application. Take, for example, the Battle of Omdurman (1898), in which the British Empire subdued a group of Mahdist fanatics using machine guns, modern rifles, and gunboats.15 So confident were the British regarding the martial prowess that British writer Hilaire Belloc cynically quipped, “Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun, and they have not.”16

To be fair, the Germans were not alone in resorting to violence to quell uprisings among their colonial outposts and, like the British and other Western powers, the Industrial Revolution provided the German Empire with modern weapons with which to enforce colonial policy, often with brutal results. Unlike the British, however, racially motivated annihilation had become part and parcel of German colonial policy by 1904. Indeed, the unsavory honor of starting the 20th century’s first genocide belongs to the Kaiser’s army under the leadership of General Lothar von Trotha, a man who would have had much in common with the likes of Theodor Eicke, the Nazi who was architect, builder, and director of Germany’s death camps.17  

While General von Trotha has been described as “a human shark” and “the most bloodthirsty animal in [Wilhelm’s] war arsenal,” he was merely an instrument in the hands of Germany’s Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II.18 It was the Kaiser, after all, who had digested a steady stream of Friedrich Ratzel’s thoughts on Social Darwinism, living space, and migration. Ratzel, a German nationalist and journalist, asserted that the means with which Germany must obtain living space (lebensraum) was through the displacement of indigenous peoples by the superior white race.19

Like Hitler after him, Kaiser Wilhelm subscribed to Ratzel’s racial theories and saw the solution for German expansion through invasion and colonization, and he inculcated this dogma into his soldiers. In a letter to the Berlin General Staff, Von Trotha wrote, “My knowledge of many central African peoples, Bantu and others, convinces me that the Negro will never submit to a treaty but only to naked force....This uprising is and remains the beginning of a racial war.”20

The idea that the Nazi Holocaust was an aberration in European history and that their crimes were without precedent is simply not true.21 The Kaiser’s brown-shirted colonial Schutztruppen (protection units) blazed a trail of brutality and murder that virtually mirrored what the Nazis did during World War II. In fact, Hitler actually likened the invasion of the Soviet Union to 19th-century colonialism when he said, “The Russian space is our India. Like the English, we shall rule this empire with a handful of men.”22 

Right: Schutztruppe in German South West Africa. Camel cavalry, 1904.  source: Wikimedia.

One struggles to comprehend how the Nazis could have believed their plan to wipe out every Jew in Europe could have succeeded. However, considering the genocide perpetrated by the Kaiserreich in the early 1900s, it is not that difficult to understand why the Nazis proceeded as they did. A blueprint for success already existed, yet from about the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, historiography relating to German colonialism took a back seat to the Nazi-era Holocaust. At present, a renewed interest in globalization has resurrected a scholarly pursuit of a subject that has for decades remained dormant.23

The sanctioned extermination of the Nama and Herero peoples in what is now Namibia eerily foreshadowed the Third Reich’s reign of terror in the 1930s and 40s. Everything from forced deportations to death camps via cattle cars, to bizarre medical experiments conducted by a Mengele ‘doppelganger’ were part of Imperial Germany’s scheme to rid the world of indigenous Southwest Africans.24 In much the same way, the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) served as a “dress rehearsal” for the German Wehrmacht in WWII, Germany’s colonization of SWA in the late 1800s was a dry run for the Nazi Holocaust.

It could be argued that a prime motivator for German colonization of SWA in the late 1800s was due to unification and industrialization. Germany was a latecomer in the tally of industrialized European nations. England experienced industrialization first, followed by France. Upon German unification in 1871, the population doubled over the next 43 years, reaching 68 million by 1914.25 Extensive overcrowding coupled with poverty exacerbated Germany’s plight and, as a result, the quest for lebensraum became a fixation amongst German nationalists and politicians.

Mass emigration to the United States offered some relief for the burdened nation, but the nationalists feared that those German emigrants would eventually lose their ‘German-ness’ as they became thoroughly Americanized. According to Theodor Luetwein, an early trailblazer for German colonization, one way to preserve the Völkisch spirit of agrarian German fortitude was to encourage German citizens to colonize the rugged scrub country of SWA.26 As governor of the newly claimed region of Swakopmund in SWA, Luetwein looked to the American West for his model and discovered that white settlement had been accelerated by the creation of railways and the forced deportation of indigenous tribes to created reservations.27 Similar to the American experience, Luetwein’s plan did not sit well with the natives living in SWA.

As more and more Germans settled the nascent colony in SWA, interactions between Germans and natives increased. And, instilled with a spirit of racial superiority, most of these interactions resulted in a negative outcome for the Herero and Nama tribes. As with the Jews in Germany during the post-Weimar Republic, the brutality meted out to Africans gradually escalated. For example, it became common and even acceptable for a German settler to rape a Herero or Nama woman. They were, after all, viewed as less than human, a viewpoint espoused by most German colonists and certainly one espoused by Luetwein.28 The situation reached a boiling point in October 1903.

Right: Central figure Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, the Oberbefehlshaber (Supreme Commander) of the protection force in German South West Africa, in Keetmanshoop during the Herero uprising, 1904. Source: Wikimedia.

In an attempt to mediate a difference between two tribespeople, a German lieutenant named Walter Jobst took it upon himself to meddle, even though the dispute had been settled between the two South Africans. Lieutenant Jobst ordered his men to arrest Jan Christian, the chief of one of the Nama clans. As his men scuffled with the Nama chief, Jobst told his men to shoot Christian, which they promptly did. In retaliation, several Nama tribesmen gunned down Jobst and two of his men. While Luetwein privately condemned Jobst’s actions, he nevertheless informed Berlin of the minor incident. When Kaiser Wilhelm caught wind of the event, he overreacted and ordered that military reinforcements be dispatched to all German colonies. 29 Spearheading Germany’s response in SWA was the man who answered only to the Chief of Staff and the Kaiser himself, General Lothar von Trotha.

On June 11, 1904, Von Trotha landed at Swakopmund clad in his brown colonial garb and festooned with the Iron Cross.30 He immediately set about planning war against those he described in his diary as Unmenschen…non-humans.31 By Von Trotha’s estimation, the Herero population numbered upwards of 80,000, followed a man named Samuel Maharero, and were encamped at the foot of a massive plateau called Waterberg. Rather than engaging a modern army, Maharero favored relocating his people to British-controlled Bechuanaland (modern Botswana). Getting there, however, meant crossing the blistering Omaheke Desert.32

Had Von Trotha simply allowed the Herero to leave SWA for Bechuanaland, the Kaiser’s goal of providing lebensraum for German colonists was as good as done. Moreover, the migration of the Herero would end the rebellion and obviate the need for Germany to expend blood and treasure to subjugate a people who no longer posed a threat. However, permitting such an exodus would rob Von Trotha of visiting the full fury of German retribution down on the rebellious natives.33 Nothing short of complete annihilation would satiate Von Trotha and the German General Staff.

Like Pharaoh pursuing the Israelites from Egypt, Von Trotha planned to encircle the Herero at Waterberg before they could embark across the Omaheke. This ‘concentric deployment’ of force proposal was developed by military strategist Helmuth von Moltke and was used as the “go-to” strategy for the Wehrmacht during the outset of Operation Barbarossa in the early 1940s. The fact that the Colonial Department loaned the Kaiser over 580 million marks worth of equipment and resources to punish the Herero, a people who had months prior ceased all aggression, reveals the disparate extent to which Germany was willing to go in its quest for lebensraum.34

Similarly, the Nazis went to extraordinary lengths in their plans to colonize Eastern Europe. According to the 1946 testimony of Reich Economy Minister Walter Funk during the Nuremberg Tribunal, the output for war production from 1941-1943 was approximately 350 million Reichsmarks (RM).35 Not only were the two Reichs comparable in their economic extravagance when it came to obtaining lebensraum, but both the Kaiser and Hitler endorsed a policy of ruthless genocide to rid themselves of those who stood in Germany’s way.

Right: German Schutztruppe.

General Von Trotha is perhaps best remembered for his infamous ‘extermination order’ he delivered to his troops some two months following the Battle of Waterberg. During that August battle, a breach opened in the German lines, allowing the Herero to escape into the Omaheke under the cover of darkness. Von Trotha discovered this the following morning, but by then, most of the Herero had fled into the desert. It soon became apparent to Von Trotha that sending already exhausted soldiers into the desert to pursue the Herero would yield abysmal results. Therefore, he ordered his men to fill in waterholes and establish picket lines in the event the Herero tried to cross back into the colony for food and water.36

When this tactic failed to net him acceptable numbers of Herero, he gathered his men on October 2, 1904, and expounded to them the official policy of the Kaiserreich towards the Herero. Von Trotha’s short directive, known as the Osobozo Windimbe proclamation, is more commonly called the Extermination Order. A single copy of Von Trotha’s order survived and is in the Botswana National Archives.37 In less than 100 words, the German Empire explicitly declared its written intent to commit genocide.38 Thirty-nine years later, Nazi Germany sanctioned a similar policy of genocide from the mouth of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler during his speech in occupied Poland.39

Like Himmler’s Einsatzgruppen (commitment units) who advanced behind the Wehrmacht in Eastern Europe, rooting out and exterminating Polish, Russian, and Jewish civilians, Von Trotha commissioned the Schutztruppen to “sweep across Hereroland” to “clean up” entire regions of non-combatant Herero, who had not fled into the desert. There were perhaps 20-30,000 remaining Herero who lived far from Waterberg and who had not taken part in the uprising. These unfortunates proved easy pickings for German patrols.40 

However, by November 1904, it became evident that efforts to ethnically cleanse SWA of the Herero had fallen short.41 In late November, Chief of the General Staff, General Alfred von Schlieffen, impressed upon Chancellor von Bülow that, “while Von Trotha’s intentions are commendable, he is powerless to carry them out.”42 Unlike most of the General Staff, Von Bülow did not approve of Von Trotha’s methods and feared for Germany’s international reputation.43 Von Bülow complained to the Kaiser that German policy in SWA was barbaric and scandalous, while Von Schlieffen lauded Von Trotha’s strategy.44 Von Bülow’s persistence paid off, and the Kaiser agreed to modify the extermination order. Von Trotha’s new “orders” contained the clause that he could show mercy…if the possibility presented itself. In an effort to soften this “blow,” Von Schlieffen affirmed, “His Majesty has not forbidden you to shoot the Hereros.”45

Unbeknownst to his General Staff, the Kaiser dispatched one of Von Trotha’s commanders, Count Georg von Stillfried, to report on the native and military conditions in SWA. Stillfried’s report impressed the Kaiser because it took into account the economic problems facing the German colony and raised a question.46 If Von Trotha were allowed to murder every last indigenous Southwest African, who would work the fields for the German settlers? Suddenly, their cheap labor force was in danger of extinction. Count Stillfried proposed a solution that was straight from the Nazi ‘playbook.’

All native prisoners were to be roused from their dwellings, marked with a unique identification tag, and placed in confined areas (concentration camps) near the place where they were to serve as slave laborers for the German colonists.47 While the Germans were certainly not the first to employ the concentration camp system, their application of it was vastly different from that of the British during their struggle with the Boers.

During the Second Boer War (1899-1902), the British enclosed captured Boer women and children within several layers of barbed wire. While many died due to disease or starvation, the primary purpose behind these camps was to prevent local civilians from supplying roving Boer guerrillas, thus prolonging the war.48 It was never Lord Kitchener’s goal to exterminate the Boers. The same could not be said of the Kaiserreich.

In February 1905, thousands of emaciated and dehydrated Hereros, who had escaped into the Omaheke Desert, began surrendering to collection patrols. With a swiftness that would have impressed Reinhard Heydrich, they were at once loaded into open cattle trucks and transported to awaiting concentration camps.49 Of the various camps set up near German settlements, Swakopmund proved to be the most efficient. Aside from the fetid conditions, the imprisoned Herero were given either 500 grams of rice or flour per day. Since neither staple was known to the Herero, they lacked the understanding of how to prepare it and consumed it raw, causing severe diarrhea. For clothing, they were issued rough gunny sacks with holes cut out for their arms and head.50 By the hundreds and thousands, the Herero prisoners at Swakopmund were worked to death while the German government turned a blind eye. However, if given the choice to remain at Swakopmund or be transferred to Shark Island, the Herero would likely have stayed at Swakopmund.

Right: Surviving Herero.

Shark Island was to SWA what Auschwitz was to Poland. Missionary August Kuhlman gave an eyewitness account of the routine ‘operations’ at Shark Island in September 1905. Kuhlman stated, “A woman, who was so weak from illness that she could not stand, crawled to some other prisoners for water. The overseer fired five shots at her. One hit her in the thigh, the other smashed her forearm. She died that night.”51 Not only were camp inmates indiscriminately murdered, but depraved physicians took the opportunity to conduct bizarre experiments on Herero and Nama prisoners at Shark Island.

Dr. Bofinger, a leading physician at Shark Island, used inmates for his own personal medical research. Determined to discover the cause of scurvy, Bofinger injected arsenic and opium into living prisoners. On one occasion, Bofinger received a shipment of decapitated Nama heads, packed in a wooden crate. After unpacking the grisly contents, Bofinger broke open the skulls, which had been scraped clean of flesh by female prisoners, and weighed the brains to ascertain the similarities between indigenous Africans and apes.52 Of course, Bofinger’s actions prefigured Nazi ‘doctors’ who oversaw a litany of inhuman experiments conducted on Jews and Russians during WWII. Like those poor souls at Shark Island, Auschwitz inmates were injected with lethal doses of typhus and jaundice, simply to watch how long it took them to die.53

A change in administration eventually brought Shark Island to a close. On April 7, 1907, Major Ludwig von Estorff replaced Von Trotha as overall commander of the SWA Schutztruppen. Major von Estorff had vehemently opposed the brutality of Von Trotha and shut down Shark Island the day after assuming command.54 While nowhere near the death tally of Auschwitz, around 4,000 Nama and Herero perished in colonial concentration camps. By 1908, eighty percent of the Herero population had either been killed in death camps or driven from the colony into the wasteland of the Omaheke.55 By all appearances, German SWA belonged to the Second Reich. The quest for lebensraum had succeeded but would not last. The Great War saw to that.

On Christmas Day, 1914, soldiers along the Western Front experienced the exceptionality of the Christmas Truce. That same day, a large force of South African soldiers, in service to the British Crown, landed at Walvis Bay on the coast of Namibia. Two weeks later, they effectively sealed off German SWA from the Kaiserreich.56 Over the next several months, the British discovered the shocking truth of what German colonialism had meant for the indigenous Southwest African people. Eager to exploit the Germans in a propaganda extravaganza, charges of disgrace, butchery, and ‘German frightfulness’ in SWA captured the world’s attention, if only for a brief moment.

The atrocities foisted upon the Nama and Herero in SWA were openly compared to the massacre of Belgian civilians during the opening moments of the Great War. Upon violation of Belgium’s neutrality, German troops marched into the town of Liège on August 5, 1914. Over the next several weeks, thousands of non-combatants were brutally murdered by German troops. Although the official German reasoning was retaliation against franc-tireurs (snipers), this excuse has since been proven a myth.57 The German army was simply reenacting in Belgium their colonial policies forged in SWA.

The fact that the racial policies and psychoses of the Kaiser Reich were passed down to the Nazis like the family china is fairly obvious.58 Much of what occurred in SWA during the early 1900s reared its “ugly head” in post-Weimar Berlin, occupied Poland, and in the death camps of Treblinka, Sobibór, Dachau, and Auschwitz. It is therefore incomprehensible why the remembrance of German genocide in SWA was overlooked at Nuremberg. It would seem that a case for causality could have been made during the prosecution of some of the world’s most heinous criminals.

David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen, authors of The Kaiser’s Holocaust (2011), suggest a case of ‘colonial amnesia’ is to blame.59 Arguably, the choice to forget one’s colonial past may have indeed been the reason allied prosecutors chose to ignore this blemish of history. After all, trudging up atrocities committed during the Boer War, Boxer Rebellion, and Trail of Tears would certainly cast a shade of hypocrisy upon those nations that had defeated the Nazis. And while it is fairly easy to indict the Germans as two-time purveyors of genocidal holocaust, one must not dismiss the fact that when human beings are viewed through the lens of Social Darwinism, the weak are always destined to be vanquished.

Notes:

1 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Colonel J.J. Graham (Military Strategy Books, 2009), 1, Kindle.

2 Baron Antoine Henri De Jomini, The Art of War, trans. Capt. G.H. Mendell and Lieut. W.P. Cragighill (1862), 2586, Kindle.

3 Samuel Gardiner, The Thirty Years War (Didactic Press, 2013), 667, Kindle.

4 William Le Queux, German Atrocities: A Record of Shameless Deeds (London: G. Newnes, Limited, 1915), 20.

5 Brian Adams, “History Doesn't Repeat, But It Often Rhymes: But there is still time to change our tune,” Huffington Post, January 9, 2017.

6 William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1960), 81.

7 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. James Murphy (White Wolf, 2014), 273, Kindle.

8 Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 447, Kindle.

9 Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998), 167-74.

10 Ibid., 185.

11 Friedrich List, National System of Political Economy, trans. G.A. Matile (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1856), 351.

12 Sebastian Conrad, German Colonialism: A Short History, trans. Sorcha O’Hagan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 36.

13 Robert M. Mambo, “Mittleafrika: The German Dream of an Empire Across Africa in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries: An Overview,” Transafrican Journal of History 20 (1991): 161.

14 Conrad, German Colonialism, 79.

15 William Wright, Omdurman 1898 (Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2012), 175, Kindle.

16 Hilaire Belloc and Basil Temple Blackwood, The Modern Traveler (London: Edward Arnold, 1898), 41.

17 Charles W. Sydnor, Soldiers of Destruction: The SS Death’s Head Division, 1933-1945 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1977), 3.

18 Günter A. Pape, Lorang: I, the Seafaring, the War on the Waterberg, my Farm in South West Africa (Klaus Hess Verlag, 2003), 186.

19 David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 2011), 109.

20 Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan, The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 30.

21 Olusoga and Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust, 3.

22 Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens (New York: Enigma Books, 2000), 33.

23 Conrad, German Colonialism, 10.

24 Olusoga and Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust, 225.

25 Ibid., 85.

26 Ibid., 89.

27 Ibid., 114.

28 Ibid., 118-19.

29 Ibid., 122.

30 Ibid., 139.

31 Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 33.

32 Olusoga and Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust, 141.

33 Ibid.

34 Helmut Bley, Namibia Under German Rule (Lit Verlag, 1998), 156.

35 Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal: Nuremberg 14 November 1945 – 1 October 1946, May 6, 1946 (Nuremberg, 1948), 129.

36 Olusoga and Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust, 146-7.

37 Ibid., 150.

38 General Lothar Von Trotha Extermination Order against the Herero, October 2, 1904, trans, Jan-Bart Gewalt. Namibian National Archives Windhoek, ZBU (Zentralbureau) D.1.a Band 3–4, leaf 165.

39 Heinrich Himmler, “Speech of the Reichsführer-SS at the SS Group Leader Meeting in Posen (Poznan), October 4, 1943,” Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team.

40 Olusoga and Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust, 151.

41 Ibid., 154.

42 Ibid., 156.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid., 157.

45 Ibid., 158.

46 Ibid., 159.

47 Ibid.

48 Byron Farwell, The Great Boer War (South Yorkshire: Pen & Sword, 2009), 350. Kindle.

49 Olusoga and Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust, 162.

50 Ibid., 165.

51 Hull, Absolute Destruction, 78.

52 Olusoga and Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust, 225.

53 Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 979.

54 Olusoga and Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust, 227.

55 Ibid., 230.

56 Ibid., 253.

57 John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 137.

58 Olusoga and Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust, 293.

59 Ibid., 344.