Hitler's Bandit Hunters (6 page)

Between 1870 and 1912, security warfare became an integral part of the German way of war. A supremo of security was not elected during the Franco–Prussian War. The only Feldherr was Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke. The francs-tireurs were a serious security problem for only a brief time. The military governments, the extent of the Etappen, and the number of security operations did not fall to a single commanding officer of an occupation security army. Security was a common responsibility accepted as a regular military routine. The rise of security warfare and the first dubious contests of its Feldherr followed the institutional changes of 1872 and surfaced within Germany’s colonial conflicts. When Schlieffen became chief of the general staff in 1891, he inherited a military and national political disaster. In July, the governor of German East Africa (Tanzania) ordered Emil von Zelewski, the commander of the local militia (
Schutztruppen
), to quell an uprising of the Wehehe tribe, in the south of the country.
⁵⁰
Zelewski led a force of fourteen “European” officers and men with 362 locally recruited Schutztruppen through the bush and mountain range. They came under repeated hit-and-run attacks, primarily because their marching order lacked discipline. On August 17, one of the German officers took a shot at an eagle flying overhead. This precipitated the Wehehe’s signal for attack. The ensuing Battle of Rugaro turned into Germany’s Little Big Horn, and Zelewski, like George Armstrong Custer, suffered the ignominy of defeat, by a band of tribesmen. In the ensuing chaos, the Schutztruppen fled, and a sixteen-year-old boy speared Zelewski to death. Only three Europeans survived, and 250 out of 320 Askaris were killed. News of the debacle, according to Jan-Bart Gewalt, arrived in Berlin by telegram announcing that Zelewski’s corps had been “shattered” (
aufgerieben).
⁵¹
Erick Mann thought much of what was later written about Emil von Zelewski absolved him. However, consciousness of the disaster became deeply rooted in the consciousness of German officer corps.
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This inauspicious beginning spurred Schlieffen to institute performance standards for all aspects of operations. It is often assumed that colonial wars played no part in European warfare and that Schlieffen was not involved in these operations, but this was not the case. He ensured that military expeditions were fully planned, organized, and commanded by professional officers.
He also observed colonial conflicts as putative testing grounds for his operational ideas. Fate, however, interrupted his plans with the first major international incident. The Boxer Rebellion (1900) might have served his purpose had Kaiser Wilhelm II not intervened. The kaiser agreed to send a military expedition to join the great powers under the command of Field Marshal Count Alfred von Waldersee, a notorious political intriguer and racist.
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The expedition embarked on July 27, 1900, under the kaiser’s orders to neither show mercy nor take prisoners.
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Encirclement failed in China. A youthful Leutnant Franz Ritter von Epp of the Ninth Bavarian Infantry Regiment volunteered for the China expedition in the hope of achieving the cherished opportunity of a baptism of fire. In April 1901, Epp took part in an operation near the Great Wall of China. Although the security operation was sanctioned by the great powers commission, the tactical details were left to the Germans. The German commander, not surprisingly, opted for encirclement, which he attempted twice against both the left and right flanks of the Boxer force, reputed to be more than one thousand soldiers strong. The Germans managed to kill two hundred, while the rest escaped. The failure of the first attempt at encirclement was blamed on the poor geographical position; the second remains less clear, although almost certainly it reflected a tactical failure by the Germans.
⁵⁵

Pursuit and Bandenbekämpfung also failed in China. On March 19, 1901, Epp’s company received word of the murder of two German soldiers. That afternoon, Epp’s 6th Company received orders to conduct a search for the men. In the dusk, they conducted a house-to-house search and interrogated the locals looking for the two men. Epp had detailed collection carts and coffins for the bodies prior to setting off, certain that the men were dead. During the search, there was obviously some kind of incident, although not clarified, but that evening the Germans camped outside the village. They had set the village on fire and held thirty Chinese as prisoners. One prisoner apparently choked through the night, without relief, the consequences of a chest wound. They found no trace of the missing soldiers except for their guns, which been thrown down a well.
⁵⁶
After arriving in China, the German troops participated in more than fifty operations. Years later, the fighting in the rebellion was recorded in the German infantry handbook as operations against Chinese “bandits” (Banden).
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The German performance in China came under severe political scrutiny from the Social Democratic Party. On January 11, 1902, August Bebel, the leader of the SPD, accused the army of excesses based on the evidence received from soldiers’ letters. One soldier told his parents that when the Chinese refused to give up food, he “hit them on the skulls” with a lance, and when several tried to protect themselves, he ran them through. The Germans invoked penalties on villages that did not conform to their rule; fines were as high as 30,000 Marks. Epp returned to Germany and reflected on the wider implications of the campaign. He thought Bebel’s accusations exaggerated or invented and believed the army had behaved bravely
and humanely. Epp did agree that the drinking and general unruly behavior of the troops remained a problem in China.

In 1904, thirteen years after the Zelewski debacle, Schlieffen had another opportunity to fully rehearse his concept of war under hostile fire conditions. In German Southwest Africa (Namibia), the Herero tribes were challenging the German’s right to rule them. With a population estimated at eighty thousand, they represented more than a few unruly clans waging a bush war (
Buschkrieg
). Schlieffen prepared a full-scale operational plan and recommended Lothar von Trotha to command the expedition. Trotha’s chief of staff was Oberstleu-tnant Charles de Beaulieu from the Army General Staff. Among the line officers were Franz Ritter von Epp and Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. The German plan called for a series of oblique maneuvers by the troops, coordinated through the Etappen, to pressure the Herero into congregating in one place. The coup de main, an encirclement of the Herero, would lead to their annihilation through superior tactics and systematic killing. The Herero gathered at the Waterberg in August 1904, and Trotha sensed this was his opportunity to strike. After the battle, Trotha wrote, “My initial plan for the operation, which I always adhered to, was to encircle the masses of Herero at Waterberg, and to annihilate these masses with a simultaneous blow.” He expected to “establish various stations to hunt down and disarm the splinter groups who escaped, later to lay hands on the captains by putting prize money on their heads and finally to sentence them to death.”
⁵⁸
A
Festschrift
published by approval of the German War Ministry (
Kriegsministerium
) confirmed the plan for battlefield decapitation and extermination.
⁵⁹

Although technically outnumbered, the German order of battle included artillery and heavy machine guns, field telecommunications, and exploitation of the railway network. The central command (
Etappenkommandantur Swakopmund
) controlled the main supply depots, as well as the flow of reserves and replacements, and managed all communications (transport and telecommunications). From the central hub, each Ortskommandantur was placed in a strategic position and guarded by a ring of guard posts. Linking these outposts was the militarized railway system with station commanders (
Bahnhofskommandantur
) and the railway troops (
Eisenbahntruppen
), erecting an internal security web across Namibia. The military railroad increased the army’s response to Herero incursions. Landwehr troops posted to the Etappen and railway installations erected defensive positions, armed strongpoints (
Stützpunkte
), with machine-gun posts and trench lines.
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Contradictory accounts of the battle that followed exist. Helmut Bley argued that the Herero broke out of the encirclement.
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Horst Drechsler believed Trotha deliberately deployed troops in such a way as to leave an opening. A gap filled by a small force under Major von der Heyde was to hold its position, while the stronger pressing force under Oberst Deimling was to force the Herero, during the melee, to break out, but only into the wastelands
of the Omaheke Desert (referred to as the Sandveld).
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Tilman Dedering suggested that poor coordination and planning allowed the Herero to break out and escape. Dedering also explained that subsequent justifications by Trotha and his staff only confused the outcome further.
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Epp happened to serve at the Waterberg in his second colonial campaign, and Epp’s version is the tacit acceptance of failure. After Trotha issued the orders on August 4, Epp noticed that there were large gaps between the encircling forces. One group, under Deimling, was slow to arrive at its designated position and was last in line. The fighting opened at 6:30 a.m., when Epp’s troops entered the fighting zone. Another unit from Epp’s group came on the receiving end of a surprise and concerted Herero counter-attack. At 8:00 a.m., the Herero attacked the left flank, and only with machine guns could the Germans hold them off. Another counter-attack at 9:30 a.m. forced Epp to deploy his artillery. A strong attack at 12:30 p.m. forced Epp to keep firing while on the move. After an hour, the fighting gave way to a pursuit that lasted until 3:15 p.m., when the Germans, without explanation, marched back to their encampments. Epp recorded that, after the battle, until August 16, his unit spent time in the “noble” soldierly task of cattle rustling.
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The escape of the Herero and their continuing acts of insurgency led the Germans to introduce Bandenbekämpfung operations. Kurd Schwabe described several such operations, and one example is especially revealing. During the occupation of Namibia in 1905, Etappen troops attempted to destroy Andreas, a Herero guerrilla leader (
Bandenführer
), and his followers. On May 12, a detachment from an Etappen company located and attacked the guerrillas by a river. After five hours of hard fighting on difficult ground, the Herero leader escaped with the loss of twenty men. The Germans had no idea of the actual size of his force. The German casualties included one officer, two troopers, and three members of the Schutztruppen. The Germans divided into two troops; one followed Andreas, while the other returned to the nearest Etappen base to report the incident. Raising a general alarm, two more detachments set off in pursuit of Andreas. One detachment came from an Etappen company; the other included ninety volunteers armed with an artillery piece and led by an Oberleutnant of the reserve.
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On May 26, Andreas fled toward the British border and was intercepted. The next day, as the Germans tried to prevent him crossing into British territory, Andreas changed direction and joined up with the Herero leader Hendrik Witbooi and remained inside Namibia.

On June 7, Andreas turned up again to rustle cattle from a German farmer and attracted the attention of three patrols, each led by an officer. They decided on immediate action and attacked Andreas, who once again disappeared. The following day, Andreas was located again and one hundred riflemen attacked his position. On the morning of June 9, the Germans attacked, and during a three-hour clash of arms, they killed Andreas’s son and fourteen other Herero, capturing 250 cattle and various booty. German casualties
included one officer killed and another wounded. Andreas fled initially along the river, and then moved into the mountains, losing the trailing Germans. German reserve companies moved into the area and conducted a cleansing (
Säuberung
) operation, rounding up non-combatants and placing them in labor camps.
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Andreas, like the proverbial bad penny, reappeared in September 1905, this time joined by a band of “Hottentots” (
Hottentottenbanden
). The Germans located his position within a mountain range. They conducted a six-hour climb to inflict a five-hour skirmish on the guerrillas. The Germans recorded more than eighty Hottentots dead from a band estimated at three hundred; a further twenty Herero were confirmed killed. The German casualties were two troopers killed and ten wounded, and again they rounded up cattle.
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Andreas escaped, outrunning the Germans to reach the British border, but was arrested by the local police. Schwabe reported that 107 Herero were captured, of whom forty-five were men with twenty-eight rifles between them.
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Referring to the latter part of the conflict, the 1913 infantry handbook recorded that in July 1905, Hendrik Witbooi had faced a concentric attack (
konzentrischen Vormarsch
) and had only escaped in “small groups of bandits” (
kleine Banden).
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The sting was in the tail. Trotha failed with Cannae, which cost the German government the deployment of sixteen thousand soldiers on long-term overseas service. In 1907, the Germans formed a police zone in Namibia as the means toward the permanent protection of the colonists.
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The zone operated 113 police stations with approximately seven men per post. A police troop of 60 senior NCOs, 320 NCOs, 60 constables, and 330 native police functioned as a rapid reaction force to quell serious outbreaks of trouble. The numbers indicate a deterrent policing screen to discourage the native population from resistance.
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Even with the German military railway serving as an iron noose around the country, preventing further uprisings, the patrols did not cause large-scale killing. In fact, the Germans had proved largely inept in both leadership and general operational capability. Schlieffen’s ideas had not defeated Herero ingenuity. The real cause of the killing lay in the occupation measures. Jürgen Zimmerer’s research of the German administration highlighted the mass deaths caused by slave labor and a deliberate policy of starvation. Zimmerer has identified the army’s experimentation with social controls and their devastating consequences on colonized communities.
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