Forgotten Genocide: Namibia's Tragic History

When the gates of the Nazi concentration camps were finally closed, as many as 15 million people had been exterminated. In the 60 years since the Second World War, Germany has come to terms with what took place in these camps. But what few people realize is that places like Auschwitz were not Germany's first concentration camps. And the Holocaust was not Germany's first genocide. These are the victims of another genocide. But these people weren't Jews or gypsies. And this genocide didn't take place in Europe. These are the remains of Africans. They were killed at the dawn of the 20th century in concentration camps run by the armies of the Kaiser's Second Reich, 30 years before Hitler even came to power. They lie here, forgotten, in the desert wastelands of what is today the modern African state of Namibia. This is the story of the genocide that modern Germany has not come to terms with. For a hundred years, what happened in Germany's long-lost African empire has been hidden. It's the story of a genocide that implicates the highest level of the German government, the army, and even some of Germany's biggest companies. But the ghosts of the Namibian genocide have been reawoken. They've returned to haunt modern liberal post-war Germany. And in doing so, they've forced Germany to wake up to a very uncomfortable fact. That the dark racial theories that helped inspire the Nazis run much deeper into German and European history than most people want to acknowledge. Soldiers received specific orders which allowed them to kill anyone. It was an overall strategy aimed at ethnically cleansing the countryside to create Lebensraum for German settlers. The whole process was genocidal. The deliberate extermination of the hereditary. The vernietigungsbefehl. The destruction order. Many members of my own family died. Today the grandchildren of those who survived the Namibian genocide have begun to fight for compensation and for Germany to acknowledge the first genocide of the 20th century, the genocide of the Second Reich. The story begins in 1884, as delegates from all the great powers of Europe gathered in the grand imperial capital of the German Reich. They met to carve up an entire continent. Germany did well out of the scramble for Africa, taking full control of Togo, Cameroon, German East Africa, and German Southwest Africa. But just as Germany was beginning her imperial project, new theories were sweeping across Europe that were to have a powerful influence upon that new empire. Some of the most influential were those of a now-forgotten geographer called Friedrich Ratzel. Friedrich Ratzel was a late 19th, early 20th century German geographer who taught at the University of Leipzig, and he is most famous today for having created Lebensraum theory, the idea that a people or nation must have space, and increasing space, as they grow in order to survive and prosper. In his book Anthropogeography, Ratzel argued that some of the living space, or Lebensraum, that Germany needed could be found in her new African colonies. And the ideas of men like Ratzel found a ready audience at the time, because behind the grandeur of the Second Reich, Germany's cities had a terrible secret. A population boom had left millions trapped in overcrowded slums and filthy tenements. Berlin itself had become a byword for urban poverty. The German poor had become the Volk ohne Raum. The people without space. And the poor were voting with their feet. During the 1870s, one and a quarter million Germans had chosen to leave and become Americans. Seen through Ratzel's Lebensraum theory, Germany now faced the choice of declining through lack of space and the loss of her population, or expanding into new lands. If she could settle her new African colonies with German farmers, these lands would become satellite states that would spread the German race across the world. A greater Second Reich would emerge, stronger and healthier. But only one of Germany's African colonies seemed to offer any real potential for the settlement of farmers and their families. Namibia, or as it was called then, German Southwest Africa. Friedrich Ratzel and other supporters of imperialism promoted South West Africa as an ideal source of Lebensraum. It was mainly free of tropical disease and although much of it was desert there were huge tracts of land suitable for farming cattle. But by 1903, only 4,000 German settlers had favored Southwest Africa over New York. One reason for the slow pace of colonization was that the land was already the living space of the local African peoples. If the folk on Oran were to find living space in southwest Africa, like colonists elsewhere, they would have to take that land from the Africans. The best land in the colony belonged to a formidable people called the Herero. The Herero of central Namibia had been in contact with the outside world since the early 1800s. They had way... their ox wagons, they had a whole section of the society which could read and write. They were extremely well armed, with the latest in firearms. These people were not people who were out of touch with what was going on in the rest of the world. They were extremely well connected. Under the governor Theodor Leutwein, Germany followed a colonial policy of negotiations, treaties and bargaining with the powerful leaders of the Herero and the colony's other tribes. But for many of the settlers who came to German South West Africa, the power and influence of the Africans was completely at odds with the racial theories they had brought with them from Europe. And they resented it. For the settlers that came here, it would have been an unbearable situation because the reality of Namibia was that they didn't own the land nor the resources. So you have this very strange, almost paradoxical colonial situation where the colonizer comes in and has to rent land and buy cattle from the people he's supposed to be colonizing. The issue of who was to own the land created huge tensions between the German settlers and the Africans. But what also began to push the two groups towards conflict was that many settlers were so convinced of their own racial supremacy, they began to believe they could treat the Africans with impunity. Normal Herero people were being made to work for Germans, and they had virtually no recourse to the law to protect themselves when they were abused. So there are very few cases in which Herero people even tried to seek legal redress when they were not paid, when they were beaten, when they were raped, or when someone in their family was killed. The reputation of German colonial soldiers when it came to the abuse of African women was so bad that it even became known back in Germany. as seen in this newspaper cartoon strip. And as the news of each murder and rape spread among the Herero, they became convinced that they had no option but to resist. They could see that the German settlers were determined to take their land and to defend it, they began to consider rebellion. The German settlers want more and more land. They want land, they want it cheaply, and they want it now. And the German soldiers see themselves as the future settlers. They want to become settlers once they finish the military service. Every situation with the German settlers and the German soldiers find one another in the desire for land. And they are opposed in this by Theodor Leutwein, the governor, and by the Herero. By Christmas, On Christmas 1903, the capital, Windhoek, was alive with rumours. In the bars, settlers and their allies in the army openly called for a war against the Herrera. Governor Leutwein was now the only force in the colony preventing war. But at the exact moment when his cool head was most needed, a minor revolt in the south meant that he and most of the garrison left. The results were disastrous. In the weeks of the governor's departure, the extremists in the army finally pushed the Herero too far. They rose up and terrible scores were settled as the relatives of Herero, raped or killed by Germans, took their revenge. In the first few days, over a hundred German soldiers and farmers were killed. But the rebellion provided the perfect pretext for the most radical among the settlers and the army to take over the land. They now set about the grim work of ethnically cleansing the colony of the Herrera. But there was a problem. Not all the Herero had rebelled. In fact, the rebellion of January 1904 was relatively localised at first, centring around the northern town of Ocahanja. Elsewhere, the Herero were just going about their normal lives. To achieve their aim of taking the land, the settlers and the army had to drag the whole Herero nation into the rebellion and transform it into a race war. The story of what happened in the tiny Herero town of Ochimbingue shows how, once the war had started, it spread to engulf the whole of the Herero people. Today, Ochimbingue is a forgotten backwater, but in 1904 it was an important Herero centre. The Hereros of Ochimbingue had close links with the community of German settlers with whom they shared the town. Three days before the outbreak of fighting in the north, the German settlers here gathered to celebrate a wedding. But that evening, a messenger arrived bringing news that the Herero at Ocahanja were on the brink of rebellion. Rather than panic, the missionaries of Ochimbingue instead met with the Herero chief Zacharias, who declared his peaceful intentions. He even wrote a letter to Governor Leutwein, declaring his loyalty to Germany. But the next evening, a group of German soldiers arrived in the town with food and ammunition. During the following days, the white population from the whole area began to abandon their farms and gather in Ochimbingue. And with each new arrival came a new story of the death and destruction that was sweeping across the colony. As their fears increased, the white population began to fortify a complex of farm buildings belonging to the Halbich family. The Herrera, meanwhile, held their normal Sunday service. As their hymns rang out across the town, the German soldiers, only metres away, paced out the range of their field of fire. Barbed wire was strung around the building and firing holes made in the walls of the Halbeck station. On 23rd January, just nine days after the start of the uprising at Okahanja, the German troops finally opened fire. Despite all their demonstrations of loyalty, the Herero of Ochimbingue was swept into a war they didn't want, against a German community amongst whom they had lived peacefully for years. What was happening in Ochimbingue was being repeated across the country. What had started as a rebellion was becoming a war. A month after the start of the conflict, Governor Leutwein finally returned to the capital. To end the fighting, he sent a message to the Herero chief, Samuel Maharero, to begin negotiations. But once the settlers learned that Leutwein had started negotiations, this fact was immediately leaked to their supporters in Berlin. Back in Germany, right-wing politicians and the pro-imperialist organizations wanted to use the Herero uprising as a pretext to take over the colony completely. When the Herero uprising breaks out, news of it reaches Berlin on the 14th of January. 1904, there is a huge pressure from the Pan-German League, from various other interest groups, attacking the governor, Leutwein, for his soft policy towards the inhabitants. of South-East Africa. And they are putting pressure as much as they can through articles, pamphlets, this kind of thing, propaganda, on public opinion and indirectly, therefore, on the government, to take a tougher line. To the right-wing press, the Herero were not a people with whom Germany should negotiate, but savages who should be crushed. The German media constructs this image of a savage enemy, this barbaric enemy that kills anybody and rapes white women and kills children. And this... There is a whole campaign in Germany, a propaganda campaign, to construct this enemy that doesn't really exist. A heady mix of nationalism, militarism and racism swept over the Second Reich. Kaiser Wilhelm II ordered a new army to be sent to crush the rebellious Herero. And to lead this force, he appointed a commander with a fearsome reputation, General Lothar von Trotter. Six months after the start of the rebellion, von Trotter landed in southwest Africa. He immediately met with Governor Leutwein and formally took over command. But at their meeting, Leutwein again appealed for negotiations to be resumed with the Herero. And this would have been the normal strategy in a colonial war. But the hysteria in Berlin meant that this no longer was a colonial war. Von Trotter is not there to negotiate. For Von Trotter, negotiation is a sign of weakness. For Von Trotter, negotiation would be a shame to German honor, to German militarism. There is only one solution, the destruction of the Herero. Unfortunately for the Herero, they did not see this. The rules of the game... The name, as it were, had changed. Yet the rebellion that von Trotter had come to crush was essentially over. After the initial outburst of violence, the Herero had changed their tactics. After twice fighting the German garrison to a stalemate, the Herero had started to avoid all contact with the Germans. The entire people had instead moved as far away from the German settlements as they could get. They gathered at the last big waterhole before the Kalahari desert, the great plateau of Waterberg, Water Mountain. There they waited, hoping for negotiations, but they never came. I think the Herreros would have considered the war over by spring 1904 because the way wars were usually fought in Namibia was there was battles and then that was it. It was over, you settle it and you negotiate terms. and that's the end of that. The Hereros had proved their point. Don't take all our land, treat us as humans, and we'll let that be that. Because they were at the point where they could have attacked Windhoek and the main stations, but decided not to. They backed off just to prove their point. So I think from the Herero point of view, they were very clear on what had happened. Now the German side of the issue is completely different. What the Herero at the Waterberg could not possibly have known was that instead of planning negotiations, they were planning to attack Windhoek. The Germans were assembling a colonial army unlike any other. Week after week in the late summer of 1904, hundreds of soldiers were sent from Germany, along with huge supplies of the latest weapons and artillery. One of the soldiers of this new army, the young lieutenant Ritter von Epp, wrote letters to his family while on his way to Namibia. They reveal the extent to which some in the army had come to see the war as a crusade for Lebensraum. This world is being redistributed. With time, we will inevitably need more space. And only by the sword will we be able to get it. This is a matter for our generation, and for our existence. Only when he was convinced that he had acquired overwhelming military might did General von Trotter order his army out of their bases and head for the Waterberg. On the morning of the 11th of August 1904, the German cannons and machine guns began to fire on the Herero. General von Trotter's battle plan was, as he said in his own words, to encircle and annihilate the Herero with a simultaneous blow. But these plans were not what they seemed. Von Trotter had left one side of the encirclement weaker, knowing that when they were defeated, the Herero would have to retreat through this gap in the German line. This would force them to escape eastwards. And to the east lay the desert that the Herero called the Oma Hake, but we know as the Kalahari. By the end of the battle, this was exactly what was happening. The Germans pursued the defeated Herrera. For week after week in the summer of 1904, they were pushed deeper and deeper into the Oma-Hake Desert. Once the Herero had been forced past the last waterholes, the Germans built a 200-mile-long line of guard posts to seal them in the desert. Now trapped, thousands began to die of thirst and starvation. But finally, to seal the fate of the Herero, von Trotter did something unprecedented in colonial history. The history of European rule in late 19th and early 20th century Africa is unbelievably brutal. But what sets the genocide apart of the Herero in German Southwest Africa is General von Trotter's explicitly articulated Vernichtungsbefehl, the Annihilation Order, in which he committed to paper his plan to destroy the Herero people. On the 1st of October, two months after the Battle of Waterberg, von Trotter and a group of German soldiers reached the waterhole of Asombo-Windimbe. The next morning, von Trotter read out a proclamation to his troops. I, the great general of the German soldiers, send this letter to the Herero people. Within the German borders, every Herero, with or without a gun, will be shot. I will no longer accept women... The important thing about Osama bin Dima is the putting down into writing an official sanctioning of genocide. Why did this take place? I think that the situation had reached an extent where the German military believed that this was perfectly acceptable. They did not see that this was possibly controversial. The Herero people must leave the land. If they do not do this, I will force them with the cannon. These are my words to the Herero people, the great general of the mighty Kaiser. The thousands of starving Herero in the Oma Hake now seemingly had no hope. But in Berlin, the news of von Trotter's extermination order was a shock. The army and its supporters in the Reichstag had badly misjudged the changeable mood of the German people. When news of the brutality with which Trotter and his troops are putting down the uprising reaches Germany, there are huge and radical protests. Above all in the Reichstag, above all among the centre party, on this issue they are radically opposed to the actual policies being conducted. And there are also newspaper articles. It's a national scandal, if you like. Despite the scandal, the Kaiser refused to order von Trotter to rescind his extermination order. For two further months the Hereros were hunted down in the Oma Hake, until finally the government forced the Kaiser's hand. On the morning of the 9th of December, a telegram was sent ordering von Trotter to accept the surrender of the Herero. The German army now began patrols to collect what was left of the Herero people. 13,000 were rounded up. Soldiers took photographs of their work. After six months being hunted by the German army, the Herero were terrified and untrusting. To persuade them to surrender, German soldiers and missionaries told the Herero that they'd been pardoned by the Kaiser and would now be allowed to return to their homelands. But this was a lie. What Germany now began was an extension of their policy of extermination, using more efficient 20th century methods. Here, by the old German fort in Windhoek, the capital of modern Namibia, lies the site of Germany's first mass concentration camp. In this tiny space, Over 4,000 people were beaten, worked and starved to death by the army of the Second Reich. What happened here and in other camps across this country is something that few people in Germany and Namibia have been willing to confront. But this is where the Herero collected by the army was sent and where the first genocide of the 20th century reached its terrible conclusion. In 1904, concentration camps were a military innovation that had only been used twice before, but in Namibia, the concept was applied in a completely new way. Concentration camps in the British model in South Africa or the original Spanish model in Cuba were essentially designed to separate freedom fighters from the people who supported them. In German South West Africa, something very different was going on. There were no more free Herero people. They were all, or almost all, in camps. In the early months of 1905, the Herero was shuttled around the country in cattle trucks. Thousands of them arrived here in Swakopmund. This town, trapped between the great dunes of the Namib Desert and the icy cold waters of the South Atlantic, was the colony's main port. A concentration camp was built here because Swakopmund was a centre of German industry and commerce. A place where the slave labor of the prisoners could be best put to use. No one today knows exactly where Swakopmund's two concentration camps were located. Yet what happened in those camps was meticulously recorded, documented and photographed by the Germans themselves. 3,000 Herero were imprisoned in Swakopmund. The majority were women and children. They were made to unload the ships that landed in port and to work on new building projects. Beatings were common, but the conditions in the camps alone proved fatal for many Herrero prisoners. Many members of my own family died in the concentration camps at Swakopmund because in Swakopmund the weather is extremely cold and they were not used to that cold weather. They were given only maybe one blanket or so. Many of them died. The food was limited, scarce. The whole system was run with bureaucratic efficiency. What happened is when the Herero were captured, they were assigned a number. And this number was noted down in a book. And these numbers could then be shifted around to whoever needed labor. And the German military was paid. for this labor. The Germans had thousands of numbered metal tags made specially and shipped out to the colony. This one is apparently unique in that the number was sketched and another number was put on because it seems like sometimes they reuse it. Looking at this purse and thinking that my aunt has to wear this thing like a dog around her neck, even my grandmother for that matter, and every her little person for that matter, it's, I don't know, I don't think there are words to express the pain. I don't have words. It's painful. The concentration camps were vast reservoirs of slave labor. As the colony's economy began to boom, the army began to rent Herero slaves to private business at a cost of ten marks a month. But incredibly, some companies were so big that they were permitted to run their own concentration camps. In Swakopmund, and in other cities as well, you would have the camp of the German military, and then you would have camps which were run by a private enterprise. One of these camps was the Vermen Company, which is one of the shipping companies. They had their own camp in which they kept people, in which they would use these people for labor. This shopping mall stands on what is believed to be the site of a concentration camp once owned and administered by the Vormann shipping line. Today, black Namibians walk from the township on the outskirts of Swakopmund to stack shelves on the site of the concentration camp where their grandparents'generation were worked to death. Deaths that were grimly and accurately recorded by the German authorities. There are at least 14 volumes in the Windhoek archives of death registers, Totenregister, and the death register lists the name of a person, which is usually unknown, the age of a person, the sex of a person, the number of the person, and for whom he or she is working. at the time of death. And the cause of death, most of the time, is death through exhaustion. And there are pre-printed death certificates, pre-printed death certificates with death through exhaustion, pre-printed on the death certificate. This was what was going on in Namibia, 1940-1909. Although there's no shortage of evidence for what happened in the camps, their memory has been wiped from Swakopmund's history. Opposite the probable site of the Vormenlein concentration camp, an antique shop sells memorabilia of the Second Reich to the tourists. Under the counter, they sell memorabilia of the Third Reich. About 2,000 Herero died in Swakopmund between 1904 and 1909. But there is no monument or plaque to mark the site of so much suffering. In fact, many in the town continue to deny the existence of the concentration camps. Each summer, the sun transforms Swakopmund into the jewel in modern Namibia's tourist industry. It's marketed as a little Germany under the African sun. The terrible past of this town is not allowed to intrude. But on the outskirts of Swakopmund, there is a bleak and graphic testimony to what happened here a century ago. Each of these mounds is the shallow grave of a victim of Swakopmund's concentration camps. But this graveyard has been denied and forgotten for a hundred years. Today this cemetery is the playground for tourists who ride dune buggies over the remains of the Herero dead. We know that there are mass graves along the Swakop River in Swakopmund. We know that there are mass graves in the shunting yards in Windhoek. And we know that in Ludwigs the people were simply thrown into the sea. But there is no monument to the people who died in the wars between 1904 and 1909. There is no monument to the first genocides of the 20th century. Slave labor from the concentration camps was used to build a new German southwest Africa. Across the country the years of the camps adorn the date plates of buildings and private homes. Even the present-day Parliament building was built by enslaved prisoners. But the biggest project carried out by slave laborers was the building of the colony's new railways. And the correspondence between the railway companies and the colonial authorities, together with the huge number of photographs taken of the work, reveal how the forced labour of starving prisoners did not just construct the tracks, but helped to continue the genocide. The best documented of the railway projects was the building of a new line in the south. It was constructed by the Lenz Company. who between the beginning of 1906 and June 1907 were issued with 2,014 concentration camp prisoners. After just six months'work, the Lenz Company reported to the colonial government that 1,359 of the prisoners had died, 67.48%. Men, women and small children, children from the year of six years, they were used as slave laborers all over the country with a terrible death toll. For instance, on the Luderitz-Aus railway line, you can see every sleeper. There is one dead body. The Luderitz-Aus railway line was built to connect Luderitz, the colony's second port, to the interior. Thanks to the war, this bleak and windswept harbour was for the first and last time in its history suddenly of strategic importance to the army. And while thousands were dying building the railways, Luderitz itself was also being rebuilt by slave labour. New houses and roads were completed, and the town's docks were upgraded. And in achieving this transformation, hundreds of prisoners from the town's concentration camp were worked to death. But there were two camps in Luderitz, and the second was different. It had been built on an island out in the harbour, Shark Island. This camp was away from public view and access to it strictly forbidden. And what was happening here was not about slave labour, but about extermination. If I were to have to use the language of the Nazi period, then I would certainly see Shark Island as a death camp. It was an island onto which people were placed. And though some people were taken off the island for labor, the express purpose was to essentially eliminate them from the Namibian landscape. It was essentially a camp in which anybody placed on that island, everybody knew they were going to die. Most of the victims of Shark Island were not Herero. After witnessing the genocide against the Herero, the southern Nama people had also risen against the Germans. They were too late to help save the Herrera, but just in time to become the newest victims of the genocide. It was specifically said in the German newspapers here that the Nama's have no merit in the world anymore. They have no reason for living. They are of no use to the world anymore. So I think that there was a very calculated attempt to eradicate the Nama on Shark Island. In September 1906, 1,732 Nama were sent to the camp after their surrender to the German army. Within seven months, 1,032 were dead. Of the survivors, 90% were too ill to work. They huddled together against the icy winds of the South Atlantic. Until very recently, there were thought to be only a handful of surviving photographs of the Shark Island camp. That was until the photograph album of the German Lieutenant von Düring came to light. Towards the end of 1905, von Düring began his journey home after fighting in the war against the Herero. Like many officers, Düring took photographs of his part in the great colonial adventure to impress people back home. Most of his photographs are simple snapshots of his friends in the colony. But the ship that was to carry von Düring back to Germany left from Luderitz Bay. And when he reached the town, he used his rank to gain access to the death camp on Shark Island, where he continued to take photographs. Shark Island is now the municipal camping site for the town of Ludericks. Visitors come here to spend the night, almost all of them completely unaware that they're camping in a place that was to provide the blueprint for the death camps of the 20th century. The death camp at Shark Island very clearly is linked to the vernichtungslager, or annihilation camp, of the Nazi regime. In both cases, prisoners were collected from faraway locations and then shipped via rail in cattle cars, called transport in both cases, and then moved to a remote location beyond the public gaze where they were systematically destroyed. The vast industrial killings of Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps lay in the future, but the idea of separating people out and simply killing them as quickly as possible was probably born at Shark Island in German Southwest Africa. There is another aspect of what happened on Shark Island that is horribly similar to what happened in the death camps of the Third Reich. The guards at Shark Island and other camps became involved in the racial sciences that had originally been used to justify the war. Soldiers began to trade in the skulls of dead Herero and Nama people, selling them to scientists, museums and universities back in Germany. The practice was so widespread that this postcard was produced showing soldiers packing the skulls. But these horrific pictures are of the severed heads of Nama prisoners, probably from Shark Island. They were preserved, numbered and labeled as Hottentots, the German name for the Nama. They were then studied by race scientists who had been inspired by the theories of a German geneticist called Eugen Fischer, whose ideas were to influence not just the Second Reich but also the Third. Eugen Fischer came in 1904 to Namibia. He was sent by some German universities and he started to make tests on perished and dead prisoners of war over Herrero and Nama. And all in all he has investigated 778 heads of dead Nama and over Herrero people. Eugen Fischer used these so-called research to prove that the black race is inferior to the Germanic or Aryan race in Europe. By measuring skulls, facial features and eye color. Fischer and his protégé sought to prove that the native peoples of Africa were not just inferior, but as he put it, animals. The racial theories that had been used to justify the genocide were now being advanced by the human remains of its victims. By 1908, the concentration camps were finally shut down. Three quarters of the Herero, 65,000 people, had been killed. Half of all the Nama people had also been exterminated. Across the country, hundreds of villages stood empty, and German Southwest Africa finally belonged to the Germans. The settlers now had all the living space they would ever need. Friedrich Ratzel's dream of Lebensraum in Africa had been made real. The last of the Herero and Nama were literally sold off to German farmers as slaves. Even today there are those who remember the years of enslavement. Evangeline Kanyoka was born in 1909 when her parents were living as slaves. I am a farmer. I have a family. The Herero and Nama were now of no threat to the settlers, and a new phase began in which the colony was portrayed as a settler paradise, and the genocide that had made all this possible was slowly forgotten. Throughout the country, the sites of concentration camps in the desert and on the coast were also forgotten. The slaughter of Waterberg faded from memory, and the suffering of the slave labourers was brushed under the carpet. A new history of the colony was fabricated, in which the events of 1904-1909 were transformed from a genocide into a glorious imperial war. But the racial theories that had allowed Germany to kill thousands of Herero and Nama lived on. At the end of the First World War, the Second Reich and her empire collapsed. Defeat pushed Germany into chaos. Millions were starving on the streets of her great cities. To save the country from a communist revolution, an extreme right-wing movement emerged from within the ranks of the German army. They were called the Freikorps, or Free Army. Among them were many former colonial troops who had taken part in the genocide in southwest Africa, the most prominent of whom was General Franz Ritter von Epp. And it was from within Epp's Freikorps regiment in Munich that a new political party was formed. Franz Ritter von Epp may be considered a kind of godfather in the early Nazi party. Serving as general in charge of Munich, he employed what looks like a who's who list of later Nazi leaders, including Walter Schütze, Rudolf Hess, and others. His right-hand man, the founder of the German stormtroopers, the Brownshirts, was Ernst Röhm. And through Röhm, he was introduced to a little lance corporal. named Adolf Hitler, who he employed to finger suspected communists within his organization. And, as Hitler said, it was under him that I first learned to speak. Von Epp did everything he could to assist his protégé, even embezzling 60,000 marks to allow Hitler to buy the Volkischer Beobacher, the Munich newspaper that became the official paper of the Nazi Party. But men like von Epp also introduced Hitler to some of the theories that had helped inspire the genocide in Namibia. From the time that he is sailing from Germany to Namibia to suppress the Herero rebellion, through his writings during the Nazi period, Franz Ritter von Epp is a forthright... ...advocate of Lebensraum. He sees it as absolutely crucial to the German people and empire that they extend well beyond their own borders. The Nazis built their electoral program upon the foundations of theories like Lebensraum, and by 1931, those ideas had helped them become a major political force. That year, they filmed their party rally in the town of Nuremberg. At Hitler's feet stands von Eck. the veteran of the Battle of Waterburg, side by side with Hitler's deputy, Hermann Goering, who was the son of the very first German governor of southwest Africa. These men, with their connections to the policies of the Second Reich, were to be at the heart of the Third. Just two years later, that Third Reich was born. Once in power, the Nazis began to apply their racial theories. But those theories had been built back in the early days of the party, with the help of books written by a man whose ideas were born in South West Africa, Eugen Fischer. And these books were read by Adolf Hitler. And even on 11 pages of Hitler's book, My Struggle, Mein Kampf, you can find a direct reference to Eugen Fischer's works. And when Hitler came to power in 1933... Eugen Fischer got many German honors. Under the Nazis, Fischer became one of the most powerful men in the world of German racial science. Much of his work was done through the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the suburbs of Berlin. Scientists here carried out hundreds of experiments and investigations to find justification for Nazi racial theory. And it was here that Fischer's ideas from South West Africa were remoulded and advanced for use by the Nazis. One of the race scientists who received funding and support from Fischer and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. was a young geneticist called Dr. Josef Mengele. At Auschwitz, experiments, theories and methods influenced by those Fischer had developed in southwest Africa were now applied by Mengele to the victims of a new genocide and a new system of concentration camp. As part of his work, Mengele sent body parts of the victims of Auschwitz back to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Just as the skulls of the Herero and Nama had been sent to German universities 30 years early. At the end of the war, Ritter von Epp and Hermann Goering were once again side by side, this time as prisoners of war. They and the rest of the surviving Nazi leadership were put on trial. But the trial that took place in this courtroom in Nuremberg made little attempt to explore the links between the crimes of the Second Reich and those of the Nazis. But 14 years ago the ghosts of the Second Reich began to stir when the independent nation of Namibia emerged from 80 years of South African control. The descendants of the Herero who had survived the genocide began to revive their history but what they discovered was that the story of the genocide had been completely wiped from official memory. Three generations of white Namibians had been born into a nation where only their history was officially accepted. And many struggled to accept what the Herero said about the genocide. This was a country that seemed sure of its past. Even today, there is not a single official monument to those who died in the genocide in Namibia. Under the Germans... memorials and statues to the soldiers who took part in the colonial wars of the Second Reich had become national monuments. A cult of denial had taken hold. Histories had been written that were at odds with the actual documents in the National Archives and the memories of men like General von Trotter. But most controversially, the Germans had built a huge statue to celebrate their victory over the Herero, actually on the site of their biggest concentration camp. You are reminded when you look at these things as the most ugly representation of our history. It's not our horse. It's not our rider. Every time we look at that horse and the rider, it reminds us of our suffering and extermination by the Germans. But the issue that the Herero have chosen to fight over is land. Most of the Herero and Nama land confiscated by the Kaiser in 1905 remains in the hands of 4,000 white commercial farmers. For most black Namibians, theirs is a country behind fences, off-limits. The Herero who'd survived the war and the concentration camps were resettled in tribal reserves. The land my family owned belongs now to a German farmer. It's no longer ours. Our people subsequently were pushed into the barren areas of the Kalahari, in the semi-desert area. That's why they farmed, and that's where I grew up. That part is painful. Until it is redressed, it will continue to be painful. For four years, Herero leaders have been embroiled in a legal case against the German government for two billion US dollars in reparations to buy back their former land. In 2004, they marked the centenary of the war and invited Germany to send a representative. The Herero wanted Germany to admit responsibility and use the word genocide. German Development Minister Heidemarie Wichser-Exul came to speak at a Herero gathering on the actual site of the Battle of Waterberg. Today I want to acknowledge the violence inflicted by the German colonists powers on your ancestors, particularly the Herero and the Nama. The atrocities, the murders, the... crimes committed at that time are today termed genocide. And nowadays, a General von Trotter would be prosecuted and convicted, and rightly so. And so, in the words of the Lord's Prayer that we share, I ask you to forgive us our trespasses and our guilt. Germany's apology to the Herero and Nama people of Namibia is a brave and almost unique step, but it's also highly controversial. They have now used the word genocide to describe the actions of General von Trotter. But Trotter left the country in 1905, and it was his successors who ran the concentration camps for three years. Germany does not accept that what happened in those camps was genocide. This apology will not appease the Herero, solve the land issue or end the reparations case. Right now we are not demanding a piece of Germany. We are demanding a piece of Namibia. It is our birthright. It is our right to demand it and to want it. We cannot be bygones while we are living like foreigners in our own country. And while we know that the Germans that caused two world wars, they are still having their land intact. Unless... these issues are addressed and some form of redress is found, our children will continue to demand it for another 1,000 years. 60 years ago, Germany began a process of acceptance and apology for the Holocaust and the Second World War. But many in Germany also claimed that the terrible crimes committed in those years were purely a product of Nazism, an aberration in German history. As the Herero continue to fight for compensation, they are confronting Germany with a history that is completely at odds with that claim. 30 years before Hitler, in a long-forgotten African empire, Germany killed thousands in the concentration camps of the Kaiser's army. This fact is tearing into the heart of the central myth upon which post-war Germany was built. And the ghosts of the Second Reich, now awoken, will not go away.

And the Holocaust was not Germany's first genocide. These are the victims of another genocide. But these people weren't Jews or gypsies. And this genocide didn't take place in Europe.

These are the remains of Africans. They were killed at the dawn of the 20th century in concentration camps run by the armies of the Kaiser's Second Reich, 30 years before Hitler even came to power. They lie here, forgotten, in the desert wastelands of what is today the modern African state of Namibia. This is the story of the genocide that modern Germany has not come to terms with.

For a hundred years, what happened in Germany's long-lost African empire has been hidden. It's the story of a genocide that implicates the highest level of the German government, the army, and even some of Germany's biggest companies. But the ghosts of the Namibian genocide have been reawoken.

They've returned to haunt modern liberal post-war Germany. And in doing so, they've forced Germany to wake up to a very uncomfortable fact. That the dark racial theories that helped inspire the Nazis run much deeper into German and European history than most people want to acknowledge. Soldiers received specific orders which allowed them to kill anyone. It was an overall strategy aimed at ethnically cleansing the countryside to create Lebensraum for German settlers.

The whole process was genocidal. The deliberate extermination of the hereditary. The vernietigungsbefehl.

The destruction order. Many members of my own family died. Today the grandchildren of those who survived the Namibian genocide have begun to fight for compensation and for Germany to acknowledge the first genocide of the 20th century, the genocide of the Second Reich. The story begins in 1884, as delegates from all the great powers of Europe gathered in the grand imperial capital of the German Reich.

They met to carve up an entire continent. Germany did well out of the scramble for Africa, taking full control of Togo, Cameroon, German East Africa, and German Southwest Africa. But just as Germany was beginning her imperial project, new theories were sweeping across Europe that were to have a powerful influence upon that new empire.

Some of the most influential were those of a now-forgotten geographer called Friedrich Ratzel. Friedrich Ratzel was a late 19th, early 20th century German geographer who taught at the University of Leipzig, and he is most famous today for having created Lebensraum theory, the idea that a people or nation must have space, and increasing space, as they grow in order to survive and prosper. In his book Anthropogeography, Ratzel argued that some of the living space, or Lebensraum, that Germany needed could be found in her new African colonies.

And the ideas of men like Ratzel found a ready audience at the time, because behind the grandeur of the Second Reich, Germany's cities had a terrible secret. A population boom had left millions trapped in overcrowded slums and filthy tenements. Berlin itself had become a byword for urban poverty.

The German poor had become the Volk ohne Raum. The people without space. And the poor were voting with their feet.

During the 1870s, one and a quarter million Germans had chosen to leave and become Americans. Seen through Ratzel's Lebensraum theory, Germany now faced the choice of declining through lack of space and the loss of her population, or expanding into new lands. If she could settle her new African colonies with German farmers, these lands would become satellite states that would spread the German race across the world.

A greater Second Reich would emerge, stronger and healthier. But only one of Germany's African colonies seemed to offer any real potential for the settlement of farmers and their families. Namibia, or as it was called then, German Southwest Africa.

Friedrich Ratzel and other supporters of imperialism promoted South West Africa as an ideal source of Lebensraum. It was mainly free of tropical disease and although much of it was desert there were huge tracts of land suitable for farming cattle. But by 1903, only 4,000 German settlers had favored Southwest Africa over New York. One reason for the slow pace of colonization was that the land was already the living space of the local African peoples. If the folk on Oran were to find living space in southwest Africa, like colonists elsewhere, they would have to take that land from the Africans.

The best land in the colony belonged to a formidable people called the Herero. The Herero of central Namibia had been in contact with the outside world since the early 1800s. They had way... their ox wagons, they had a whole section of the society which could read and write. They were extremely well armed, with the latest in firearms.

These people were not people who were out of touch with what was going on in the rest of the world. They were extremely well connected. Under the governor Theodor Leutwein, Germany followed a colonial policy of negotiations, treaties and bargaining with the powerful leaders of the Herero and the colony's other tribes. But for many of the settlers who came to German South West Africa, the power and influence of the Africans was completely at odds with the racial theories they had brought with them from Europe.

And they resented it. For the settlers that came here, it would have been an unbearable situation because the reality of Namibia was that they didn't own the land nor the resources. So you have this very strange, almost paradoxical colonial situation where the colonizer comes in and has to rent land and buy cattle from the people he's supposed to be colonizing.

The issue of who was to own the land created huge tensions between the German settlers and the Africans. But what also began to push the two groups towards conflict was that many settlers were so convinced of their own racial supremacy, they began to believe they could treat the Africans with impunity. Normal Herero people were being made to work for Germans, and they had virtually no recourse to the law to protect themselves when they were abused.

So there are very few cases in which Herero people even tried to seek legal redress when they were not paid, when they were beaten, when they were raped, or when someone in their family was killed. The reputation of German colonial soldiers when it came to the abuse of African women was so bad that it even became known back in Germany. as seen in this newspaper cartoon strip.

And as the news of each murder and rape spread among the Herero, they became convinced that they had no option but to resist. They could see that the German settlers were determined to take their land and to defend it, they began to consider rebellion. The German settlers want more and more land.

They want land, they want it cheaply, and they want it now. And the German soldiers see themselves as the future settlers. They want to become settlers once they finish the military service. Every situation with the German settlers and the German soldiers find one another in the desire for land.

And they are opposed in this by Theodor Leutwein, the governor, and by the Herero. By Christmas, On Christmas 1903, the capital, Windhoek, was alive with rumours. In the bars, settlers and their allies in the army openly called for a war against the Herrera. Governor Leutwein was now the only force in the colony preventing war. But at the exact moment when his cool head was most needed, a minor revolt in the south meant that he and most of the garrison left.

The results were disastrous. In the weeks of the governor's departure, the extremists in the army finally pushed the Herero too far. They rose up and terrible scores were settled as the relatives of Herero, raped or killed by Germans, took their revenge.

In the first few days, over a hundred German soldiers and farmers were killed. But the rebellion provided the perfect pretext for the most radical among the settlers and the army to take over the land. They now set about the grim work of ethnically cleansing the colony of the Herrera.

But there was a problem. Not all the Herero had rebelled. In fact, the rebellion of January 1904 was relatively localised at first, centring around the northern town of Ocahanja.

Elsewhere, the Herero were just going about their normal lives. To achieve their aim of taking the land, the settlers and the army had to drag the whole Herero nation into the rebellion and transform it into a race war. The story of what happened in the tiny Herero town of Ochimbingue shows how, once the war had started, it spread to engulf the whole of the Herero people. Today, Ochimbingue is a forgotten backwater, but in 1904 it was an important Herero centre.

The Hereros of Ochimbingue had close links with the community of German settlers with whom they shared the town. Three days before the outbreak of fighting in the north, the German settlers here gathered to celebrate a wedding. But that evening, a messenger arrived bringing news that the Herero at Ocahanja were on the brink of rebellion.

Rather than panic, the missionaries of Ochimbingue instead met with the Herero chief Zacharias, who declared his peaceful intentions. He even wrote a letter to Governor Leutwein, declaring his loyalty to Germany. But the next evening, a group of German soldiers arrived in the town with food and ammunition.

During the following days, the white population from the whole area began to abandon their farms and gather in Ochimbingue. And with each new arrival came a new story of the death and destruction that was sweeping across the colony. As their fears increased, the white population began to fortify a complex of farm buildings belonging to the Halbich family. The Herrera, meanwhile, held their normal Sunday service. As their hymns rang out across the town, the German soldiers, only metres away, paced out the range of their field of fire.

Barbed wire was strung around the building and firing holes made in the walls of the Halbeck station. On 23rd January, just nine days after the start of the uprising at Okahanja, the German troops finally opened fire. Despite all their demonstrations of loyalty, the Herero of Ochimbingue was swept into a war they didn't want, against a German community amongst whom they had lived peacefully for years. What was happening in Ochimbingue was being repeated across the country.

What had started as a rebellion was becoming a war. A month after the start of the conflict, Governor Leutwein finally returned to the capital. To end the fighting, he sent a message to the Herero chief, Samuel Maharero, to begin negotiations.

But once the settlers learned that Leutwein had started negotiations, this fact was immediately leaked to their supporters in Berlin. Back in Germany, right-wing politicians and the pro-imperialist organizations wanted to use the Herero uprising as a pretext to take over the colony completely. When the Herero uprising breaks out, news of it reaches Berlin on the 14th of January. 1904, there is a huge pressure from the Pan-German League, from various other interest groups, attacking the governor, Leutwein, for his soft policy towards the inhabitants.

of South-East Africa. And they are putting pressure as much as they can through articles, pamphlets, this kind of thing, propaganda, on public opinion and indirectly, therefore, on the government, to take a tougher line. To the right-wing press, the Herero were not a people with whom Germany should negotiate, but savages who should be crushed.

The German media constructs this image of a savage enemy, this barbaric enemy that kills anybody and rapes white women and kills children. And this... There is a whole campaign in Germany, a propaganda campaign, to construct this enemy that doesn't really exist.

A heady mix of nationalism, militarism and racism swept over the Second Reich. Kaiser Wilhelm II ordered a new army to be sent to crush the rebellious Herero. And to lead this force, he appointed a commander with a fearsome reputation, General Lothar von Trotter. Six months after the start of the rebellion, von Trotter landed in southwest Africa.

He immediately met with Governor Leutwein and formally took over command. But at their meeting, Leutwein again appealed for negotiations to be resumed with the Herero. And this would have been the normal strategy in a colonial war. But the hysteria in Berlin meant that this no longer was a colonial war.

Von Trotter is not there to negotiate. For Von Trotter, negotiation is a sign of weakness. For Von Trotter, negotiation would be a shame to German honor, to German militarism.

There is only one solution, the destruction of the Herero. Unfortunately for the Herero, they did not see this. The rules of the game... The name, as it were, had changed.

Yet the rebellion that von Trotter had come to crush was essentially over. After the initial outburst of violence, the Herero had changed their tactics. After twice fighting the German garrison to a stalemate, the Herero had started to avoid all contact with the Germans.

The entire people had instead moved as far away from the German settlements as they could get. They gathered at the last big waterhole before the Kalahari desert, the great plateau of Waterberg, Water Mountain. There they waited, hoping for negotiations, but they never came.

I think the Herreros would have considered the war over by spring 1904 because the way wars were usually fought in Namibia was there was battles and then that was it. It was over, you settle it and you negotiate terms. and that's the end of that.

The Hereros had proved their point. Don't take all our land, treat us as humans, and we'll let that be that. Because they were at the point where they could have attacked Windhoek and the main stations, but decided not to.

They backed off just to prove their point. So I think from the Herero point of view, they were very clear on what had happened. Now the German side of the issue is completely different. What the Herero at the Waterberg could not possibly have known was that instead of planning negotiations, they were planning to attack Windhoek. The Germans were assembling a colonial army unlike any other.

Week after week in the late summer of 1904, hundreds of soldiers were sent from Germany, along with huge supplies of the latest weapons and artillery. One of the soldiers of this new army, the young lieutenant Ritter von Epp, wrote letters to his family while on his way to Namibia. They reveal the extent to which some in the army had come to see the war as a crusade for Lebensraum.

This world is being redistributed. With time, we will inevitably need more space. And only by the sword will we be able to get it.

This is a matter for our generation, and for our existence. Only when he was convinced that he had acquired overwhelming military might did General von Trotter order his army out of their bases and head for the Waterberg. On the morning of the 11th of August 1904, the German cannons and machine guns began to fire on the Herero. General von Trotter's battle plan was, as he said in his own words, to encircle and annihilate the Herero with a simultaneous blow.

But these plans were not what they seemed. Von Trotter had left one side of the encirclement weaker, knowing that when they were defeated, the Herero would have to retreat through this gap in the German line. This would force them to escape eastwards.

And to the east lay the desert that the Herero called the Oma Hake, but we know as the Kalahari. By the end of the battle, this was exactly what was happening. The Germans pursued the defeated Herrera. For week after week in the summer of 1904, they were pushed deeper and deeper into the Oma-Hake Desert. Once the Herero had been forced past the last waterholes, the Germans built a 200-mile-long line of guard posts to seal them in the desert.

Now trapped, thousands began to die of thirst and starvation. But finally, to seal the fate of the Herero, von Trotter did something unprecedented in colonial history. The history of European rule in late 19th and early 20th century Africa is unbelievably brutal. But what sets the genocide apart of the Herero in German Southwest Africa is General von Trotter's explicitly articulated Vernichtungsbefehl, the Annihilation Order, in which he committed to paper his plan to destroy the Herero people.

On the 1st of October, two months after the Battle of Waterberg, von Trotter and a group of German soldiers reached the waterhole of Asombo-Windimbe. The next morning, von Trotter read out a proclamation to his troops. I, the great general of the German soldiers, send this letter to the Herero people.

Within the German borders, every Herero, with or without a gun, will be shot. I will no longer accept women... The important thing about Osama bin Dima is the putting down into writing an official sanctioning of genocide.

Why did this take place? I think that the situation had reached an extent where the German military believed that this was perfectly acceptable. They did not see that this was possibly controversial.

The Herero people must leave the land. If they do not do this, I will force them with the cannon. These are my words to the Herero people, the great general of the mighty Kaiser.

The thousands of starving Herero in the Oma Hake now seemingly had no hope. But in Berlin, the news of von Trotter's extermination order was a shock. The army and its supporters in the Reichstag had badly misjudged the changeable mood of the German people.

When news of the brutality with which Trotter and his troops are putting down the uprising reaches Germany, there are huge and radical protests. Above all in the Reichstag, above all among the centre party, on this issue they are radically opposed to the actual policies being conducted. And there are also newspaper articles.

It's a national scandal, if you like. Despite the scandal, the Kaiser refused to order von Trotter to rescind his extermination order. For two further months the Hereros were hunted down in the Oma Hake, until finally the government forced the Kaiser's hand. On the morning of the 9th of December, a telegram was sent ordering von Trotter to accept the surrender of the Herero. The German army now began patrols to collect what was left of the Herero people.

13,000 were rounded up. Soldiers took photographs of their work. After six months being hunted by the German army, the Herero were terrified and untrusting. To persuade them to surrender, German soldiers and missionaries told the Herero that they'd been pardoned by the Kaiser and would now be allowed to return to their homelands.

But this was a lie. What Germany now began was an extension of their policy of extermination, using more efficient 20th century methods. Here, by the old German fort in Windhoek, the capital of modern Namibia, lies the site of Germany's first mass concentration camp. In this tiny space, Over 4,000 people were beaten, worked and starved to death by the army of the Second Reich. What happened here and in other camps across this country is something that few people in Germany and Namibia have been willing to confront.

But this is where the Herero collected by the army was sent and where the first genocide of the 20th century reached its terrible conclusion. In 1904, concentration camps were a military innovation that had only been used twice before, but in Namibia, the concept was applied in a completely new way. Concentration camps in the British model in South Africa or the original Spanish model in Cuba were essentially designed to separate freedom fighters from the people who supported them.

In German South West Africa, something very different was going on. There were no more free Herero people. They were all, or almost all, in camps. In the early months of 1905, the Herero was shuttled around the country in cattle trucks. Thousands of them arrived here in Swakopmund.

This town, trapped between the great dunes of the Namib Desert and the icy cold waters of the South Atlantic, was the colony's main port. A concentration camp was built here because Swakopmund was a centre of German industry and commerce. A place where the slave labor of the prisoners could be best put to use. No one today knows exactly where Swakopmund's two concentration camps were located.

Yet what happened in those camps was meticulously recorded, documented and photographed by the Germans themselves. 3,000 Herero were imprisoned in Swakopmund. The majority were women and children.

They were made to unload the ships that landed in port and to work on new building projects. Beatings were common, but the conditions in the camps alone proved fatal for many Herrero prisoners. Many members of my own family died in the concentration camps at Swakopmund because in Swakopmund the weather is extremely cold and they were not used to that cold weather. They were given only maybe one blanket or so. Many of them died.

The food was limited, scarce. The whole system was run with bureaucratic efficiency. What happened is when the Herero were captured, they were assigned a number. And this number was noted down in a book. And these numbers could then be shifted around to whoever needed labor.

And the German military was paid. for this labor. The Germans had thousands of numbered metal tags made specially and shipped out to the colony.

This one is apparently unique in that the number was sketched and another number was put on because it seems like sometimes they reuse it. Looking at this purse and thinking that my aunt has to wear this thing like a dog around her neck, even my grandmother for that matter, and every her little person for that matter, it's, I don't know, I don't think there are words to express the pain. I don't have words. It's painful. The concentration camps were vast reservoirs of slave labor.

As the colony's economy began to boom, the army began to rent Herero slaves to private business at a cost of ten marks a month. But incredibly, some companies were so big that they were permitted to run their own concentration camps. In Swakopmund, and in other cities as well, you would have the camp of the German military, and then you would have camps which were run by a private enterprise.

One of these camps was the Vermen Company, which is one of the shipping companies. They had their own camp in which they kept people, in which they would use these people for labor. This shopping mall stands on what is believed to be the site of a concentration camp once owned and administered by the Vormann shipping line. Today, black Namibians walk from the township on the outskirts of Swakopmund to stack shelves on the site of the concentration camp where their grandparents'generation were worked to death. Deaths that were grimly and accurately recorded by the German authorities.

There are at least 14 volumes in the Windhoek archives of death registers, Totenregister, and the death register lists the name of a person, which is usually unknown, the age of a person, the sex of a person, the number of the person, and for whom he or she is working. at the time of death. And the cause of death, most of the time, is death through exhaustion.

And there are pre-printed death certificates, pre-printed death certificates with death through exhaustion, pre-printed on the death certificate. This was what was going on in Namibia, 1940-1909. Although there's no shortage of evidence for what happened in the camps, their memory has been wiped from Swakopmund's history.

Opposite the probable site of the Vormenlein concentration camp, an antique shop sells memorabilia of the Second Reich to the tourists. Under the counter, they sell memorabilia of the Third Reich. About 2,000 Herero died in Swakopmund between 1904 and 1909. But there is no monument or plaque to mark the site of so much suffering.

In fact, many in the town continue to deny the existence of the concentration camps. Each summer, the sun transforms Swakopmund into the jewel in modern Namibia's tourist industry. It's marketed as a little Germany under the African sun. The terrible past of this town is not allowed to intrude. But on the outskirts of Swakopmund, there is a bleak and graphic testimony to what happened here a century ago.

Each of these mounds is the shallow grave of a victim of Swakopmund's concentration camps. But this graveyard has been denied and forgotten for a hundred years. Today this cemetery is the playground for tourists who ride dune buggies over the remains of the Herero dead.

We know that there are mass graves along the Swakop River in Swakopmund. We know that there are mass graves in the shunting yards in Windhoek. And we know that in Ludwigs the people were simply thrown into the sea.

But there is no monument to the people who died in the wars between 1904 and 1909. There is no monument to the first genocides of the 20th century. Slave labor from the concentration camps was used to build a new German southwest Africa. Across the country the years of the camps adorn the date plates of buildings and private homes. Even the present-day Parliament building was built by enslaved prisoners.

But the biggest project carried out by slave laborers was the building of the colony's new railways. And the correspondence between the railway companies and the colonial authorities, together with the huge number of photographs taken of the work, reveal how the forced labour of starving prisoners did not just construct the tracks, but helped to continue the genocide. The best documented of the railway projects was the building of a new line in the south. It was constructed by the Lenz Company.

who between the beginning of 1906 and June 1907 were issued with 2,014 concentration camp prisoners. After just six months'work, the Lenz Company reported to the colonial government that 1,359 of the prisoners had died, 67.48%. Men, women and small children, children from the year of six years, they were used as slave laborers all over the country with a terrible death toll. For instance, on the Luderitz-Aus railway line, you can see every sleeper.

There is one dead body. The Luderitz-Aus railway line was built to connect Luderitz, the colony's second port, to the interior. Thanks to the war, this bleak and windswept harbour was for the first and last time in its history suddenly of strategic importance to the army.

And while thousands were dying building the railways, Luderitz itself was also being rebuilt by slave labour. New houses and roads were completed, and the town's docks were upgraded. And in achieving this transformation, hundreds of prisoners from the town's concentration camp were worked to death. But there were two camps in Luderitz, and the second was different.

It had been built on an island out in the harbour, Shark Island. This camp was away from public view and access to it strictly forbidden. And what was happening here was not about slave labour, but about extermination. If I were to have to use the language of the Nazi period, then I would certainly see Shark Island as a death camp. It was an island onto which people were placed.

And though some people were taken off the island for labor, the express purpose was to essentially eliminate them from the Namibian landscape. It was essentially a camp in which anybody placed on that island, everybody knew they were going to die. Most of the victims of Shark Island were not Herero. After witnessing the genocide against the Herero, the southern Nama people had also risen against the Germans. They were too late to help save the Herrera, but just in time to become the newest victims of the genocide.

It was specifically said in the German newspapers here that the Nama's have no merit in the world anymore. They have no reason for living. They are of no use to the world anymore.

So I think that there was a very calculated attempt to eradicate the Nama on Shark Island. In September 1906, 1,732 Nama were sent to the camp after their surrender to the German army. Within seven months, 1,032 were dead.

Of the survivors, 90% were too ill to work. They huddled together against the icy winds of the South Atlantic. Until very recently, there were thought to be only a handful of surviving photographs of the Shark Island camp. That was until the photograph album of the German Lieutenant von Düring came to light. Towards the end of 1905, von Düring began his journey home after fighting in the war against the Herero.

Like many officers, Düring took photographs of his part in the great colonial adventure to impress people back home. Most of his photographs are simple snapshots of his friends in the colony. But the ship that was to carry von Düring back to Germany left from Luderitz Bay. And when he reached the town, he used his rank to gain access to the death camp on Shark Island, where he continued to take photographs. Shark Island is now the municipal camping site for the town of Ludericks.

Visitors come here to spend the night, almost all of them completely unaware that they're camping in a place that was to provide the blueprint for the death camps of the 20th century. The death camp at Shark Island very clearly is linked to the vernichtungslager, or annihilation camp, of the Nazi regime. In both cases, prisoners were collected from faraway locations and then shipped via rail in cattle cars, called transport in both cases, and then moved to a remote location beyond the public gaze where they were systematically destroyed.

The vast industrial killings of Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps lay in the future, but the idea of separating people out and simply killing them as quickly as possible was probably born at Shark Island in German Southwest Africa. There is another aspect of what happened on Shark Island that is horribly similar to what happened in the death camps of the Third Reich. The guards at Shark Island and other camps became involved in the racial sciences that had originally been used to justify the war.

Soldiers began to trade in the skulls of dead Herero and Nama people, selling them to scientists, museums and universities back in Germany. The practice was so widespread that this postcard was produced showing soldiers packing the skulls. But these horrific pictures are of the severed heads of Nama prisoners, probably from Shark Island.

They were preserved, numbered and labeled as Hottentots, the German name for the Nama. They were then studied by race scientists who had been inspired by the theories of a German geneticist called Eugen Fischer, whose ideas were to influence not just the Second Reich but also the Third. Eugen Fischer came in 1904 to Namibia. He was sent by some German universities and he started to make tests on perished and dead prisoners of war over Herrero and Nama.

And all in all he has investigated 778 heads of dead Nama and over Herrero people. Eugen Fischer used these so-called research to prove that the black race is inferior to the Germanic or Aryan race in Europe. By measuring skulls, facial features and eye color.

Fischer and his protégé sought to prove that the native peoples of Africa were not just inferior, but as he put it, animals. The racial theories that had been used to justify the genocide were now being advanced by the human remains of its victims. By 1908, the concentration camps were finally shut down.

Three quarters of the Herero, 65,000 people, had been killed. Half of all the Nama people had also been exterminated. Across the country, hundreds of villages stood empty, and German Southwest Africa finally belonged to the Germans. The settlers now had all the living space they would ever need. Friedrich Ratzel's dream of Lebensraum in Africa had been made real.

The last of the Herero and Nama were literally sold off to German farmers as slaves. Even today there are those who remember the years of enslavement. Evangeline Kanyoka was born in 1909 when her parents were living as slaves. I am a farmer.

I have a family. The Herero and Nama were now of no threat to the settlers, and a new phase began in which the colony was portrayed as a settler paradise, and the genocide that had made all this possible was slowly forgotten. Throughout the country, the sites of concentration camps in the desert and on the coast were also forgotten.

The slaughter of Waterberg faded from memory, and the suffering of the slave labourers was brushed under the carpet. A new history of the colony was fabricated, in which the events of 1904-1909 were transformed from a genocide into a glorious imperial war. But the racial theories that had allowed Germany to kill thousands of Herero and Nama lived on. At the end of the First World War, the Second Reich and her empire collapsed. Defeat pushed Germany into chaos.

Millions were starving on the streets of her great cities. To save the country from a communist revolution, an extreme right-wing movement emerged from within the ranks of the German army. They were called the Freikorps, or Free Army.

Among them were many former colonial troops who had taken part in the genocide in southwest Africa, the most prominent of whom was General Franz Ritter von Epp. And it was from within Epp's Freikorps regiment in Munich that a new political party was formed. Franz Ritter von Epp may be considered a kind of godfather in the early Nazi party. Serving as general in charge of Munich, he employed what looks like a who's who list of later Nazi leaders, including Walter Schütze, Rudolf Hess, and others.

His right-hand man, the founder of the German stormtroopers, the Brownshirts, was Ernst Röhm. And through Röhm, he was introduced to a little lance corporal. named Adolf Hitler, who he employed to finger suspected communists within his organization.

And, as Hitler said, it was under him that I first learned to speak. Von Epp did everything he could to assist his protégé, even embezzling 60,000 marks to allow Hitler to buy the Volkischer Beobacher, the Munich newspaper that became the official paper of the Nazi Party. But men like von Epp also introduced Hitler to some of the theories that had helped inspire the genocide in Namibia. From the time that he is sailing from Germany to Namibia to suppress the Herero rebellion, through his writings during the Nazi period, Franz Ritter von Epp is a forthright...

...advocate of Lebensraum. He sees it as absolutely crucial to the German people and empire that they extend well beyond their own borders. The Nazis built their electoral program upon the foundations of theories like Lebensraum, and by 1931, those ideas had helped them become a major political force. That year, they filmed their party rally in the town of Nuremberg.

At Hitler's feet stands von Eck. the veteran of the Battle of Waterburg, side by side with Hitler's deputy, Hermann Goering, who was the son of the very first German governor of southwest Africa. These men, with their connections to the policies of the Second Reich, were to be at the heart of the Third.

Just two years later, that Third Reich was born. Once in power, the Nazis began to apply their racial theories. But those theories had been built back in the early days of the party, with the help of books written by a man whose ideas were born in South West Africa, Eugen Fischer. And these books were read by Adolf Hitler.

And even on 11 pages of Hitler's book, My Struggle, Mein Kampf, you can find a direct reference to Eugen Fischer's works. And when Hitler came to power in 1933... Eugen Fischer got many German honors. Under the Nazis, Fischer became one of the most powerful men in the world of German racial science. Much of his work was done through the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the suburbs of Berlin.

Scientists here carried out hundreds of experiments and investigations to find justification for Nazi racial theory. And it was here that Fischer's ideas from South West Africa were remoulded and advanced for use by the Nazis. One of the race scientists who received funding and support from Fischer and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. was a young geneticist called Dr. Josef Mengele.

At Auschwitz, experiments, theories and methods influenced by those Fischer had developed in southwest Africa were now applied by Mengele to the victims of a new genocide and a new system of concentration camp. As part of his work, Mengele sent body parts of the victims of Auschwitz back to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Just as the skulls of the Herero and Nama had been sent to German universities 30 years early. At the end of the war, Ritter von Epp and Hermann Goering were once again side by side, this time as prisoners of war. They and the rest of the surviving Nazi leadership were put on trial.

But the trial that took place in this courtroom in Nuremberg made little attempt to explore the links between the crimes of the Second Reich and those of the Nazis. But 14 years ago the ghosts of the Second Reich began to stir when the independent nation of Namibia emerged from 80 years of South African control. The descendants of the Herero who had survived the genocide began to revive their history but what they discovered was that the story of the genocide had been completely wiped from official memory. Three generations of white Namibians had been born into a nation where only their history was officially accepted. And many struggled to accept what the Herero said about the genocide.

This was a country that seemed sure of its past. Even today, there is not a single official monument to those who died in the genocide in Namibia. Under the Germans...

memorials and statues to the soldiers who took part in the colonial wars of the Second Reich had become national monuments. A cult of denial had taken hold. Histories had been written that were at odds with the actual documents in the National Archives and the memories of men like General von Trotter. But most controversially, the Germans had built a huge statue to celebrate their victory over the Herero, actually on the site of their biggest concentration camp.

You are reminded when you look at these things as the most ugly representation of our history. It's not our horse. It's not our rider.

Every time we look at that horse and the rider, it reminds us of our suffering and extermination by the Germans. But the issue that the Herero have chosen to fight over is land. Most of the Herero and Nama land confiscated by the Kaiser in 1905 remains in the hands of 4,000 white commercial farmers. For most black Namibians, theirs is a country behind fences, off-limits. The Herero who'd survived the war and the concentration camps were resettled in tribal reserves.

The land my family owned belongs now to a German farmer. It's no longer ours. Our people subsequently were pushed into the barren areas of the Kalahari, in the semi-desert area. That's why they farmed, and that's where I grew up.

That part is painful. Until it is redressed, it will continue to be painful. For four years, Herero leaders have been embroiled in a legal case against the German government for two billion US dollars in reparations to buy back their former land. In 2004, they marked the centenary of the war and invited Germany to send a representative. The Herero wanted Germany to admit responsibility and use the word genocide.

German Development Minister Heidemarie Wichser-Exul came to speak at a Herero gathering on the actual site of the Battle of Waterberg. Today I want to acknowledge the violence inflicted by the German colonists powers on your ancestors, particularly the Herero and the Nama. The atrocities, the murders, the...

crimes committed at that time are today termed genocide. And nowadays, a General von Trotter would be prosecuted and convicted, and rightly so. And so, in the words of the Lord's Prayer that we share, I ask you to forgive us our trespasses and our guilt. Germany's apology to the Herero and Nama people of Namibia is a brave and almost unique step, but it's also highly controversial.

They have now used the word genocide to describe the actions of General von Trotter. But Trotter left the country in 1905, and it was his successors who ran the concentration camps for three years. Germany does not accept that what happened in those camps was genocide.

This apology will not appease the Herero, solve the land issue or end the reparations case. Right now we are not demanding a piece of Germany. We are demanding a piece of Namibia. It is our birthright. It is our right to demand it and to want it.

We cannot be bygones while we are living like foreigners in our own country. And while we know that the Germans that caused two world wars, they are still having their land intact. Unless...

these issues are addressed and some form of redress is found, our children will continue to demand it for another 1,000 years. 60 years ago, Germany began a process of acceptance and apology for the Holocaust and the Second World War. But many in Germany also claimed that the terrible crimes committed in those years were purely a product of Nazism, an aberration in German history. As the Herero continue to fight for compensation, they are confronting Germany with a history that is completely at odds with that claim.

30 years before Hitler, in a long-forgotten African empire, Germany killed thousands in the concentration camps of the Kaiser's army. This fact is tearing into the heart of the central myth upon which post-war Germany was built. And the ghosts of the Second Reich, now awoken, will not go away.

Transcript for:Forgotten Genocide: Namibia's Tragic History

Transcript for:
Forgotten Genocide: Namibia's Tragic History