Kaiser's Holocaust (35 page)

In his rush to find evidence to support his contention that an epidemic of scurvy was ravaging the population of Shark Island,
Dr Bofinger overlooked the more obvious explanation for the incredibly high death rate: the prisoners were living, half starved, on the edge of the South Atlantic in huts made of rags and being forced to carry out manual labour in ice-cold water. They were dying of malnutrition, exposure and exhaustion, rather than scurvy. Ironically, one of the substances Dr Bofinger tested on the Shark Island prisoners was crystallised lemon juice; if the cause of their suffering had been scurvy, Bofinger might have stumbled on a cure.

According to Missionary Laaf, Dr Bofinger was deeply feared by the prisoners. Writing in the
Missionary Chronicles
of 1906, Laaf reported that prisoners he had spoken to claimed that anyone who entered Bofinger’s field hospital ‘will not come out alive’. Laaf noted that it ‘was never the case that even a single person recovered in the Lazarett [Field Hospital]’.
42
Dr Bofinger was somehow unable to understand why he was so feared and complained that ‘the natives, especially the Nama, were only with difficulty persuaded to go the communal tent clinic that had been set up for them, and, in the course of the night, they would crawl back [and hide] in their own quarters’.

The death camp on Shark Island was finally closed in April 1907, over a year and a half after the Nama had surrendered and nearly three years since the battle of the Waterberg. What brought about the decommissioning of the camp was not a rejection of the policy of extermination, but a temporary shift in the balance of power that saw influence slip away from Governor von Lindequist and Oskar Hintrager, and fall into the hands of Major Ludwig von Estorff.

Von Estorff was the commander who had promised Samuel Izaak peace and freedom in return for his surrender in 1905, and had opposed von Trotha’s policies in the Omaheke. For this he had been dismissed by the general as an
Alte Afrikaner
– an old-fashioned colonialist whose judgement was clouded by an
unhealthy preoccupation with the continued existence of the African peoples of German South-West Africa. In April 1907 von Estorff was appointed Commander of the South-West African
Schutztruppe
. By chance the promotion was approved while he was on a visit to Lüderitz, during which he had seen at first hand the fate of the Nama on Shark Island. On taking up his new post, von Estorff immediately signalled his unwillingness to permit officers and men under his command to be deployed in the administration of the Shark Island camp, calling it ‘a hangman’s duty’. Against the express wishes of von Lindequist’s office, he ordered the camp closed.
43

On 8 April 151 men, 279 women and 143 children staggered across the narrow causeway between Shark Island and the mainland. They were taken through the town of Lüderitz itself, in full view of the local population. Some, including Samuel Izaak, were too weak to walk and had to be carried. Their destination was a sheltered bay on the other side of the harbour in which they were provided with blankets and food. Of the 573 Nama evacuated from Shark Island, 123 were so sick that von Estorff and Zülow believed that they were likely to die in the near future.

Estorff vented his disgust at what had taken place on Shark Island in a furious telegram to Oskar Hintrager. He warned, ‘I am not prepared to accept the responsibility [for their deaths], since they were brought here in contravention of the promise I gave them in Gibeon in 1905, with the explicit support of the Command.’
44

Von Estorff also dispatched an emphatic protest to the Colonial Department in Berlin, and it was this that ultimately forced Lindequist and Hintrager to accept the closure of a facility they had fought so hard to keep open. Von Lindequist was in Berlin when the camp’s closure was authorised, lobbying the Reichstag for an increased colonial budget. Had he been in Windhoek, von Estorff might not have been successful.

Von Estorff’s telegrams to the Colonial Department initiated a ridiculous exchange of communications between the administration in Windhoek and the Colonial Department in Berlin. The
Head of the Colonial Department, Bernhardt Dernburg, feigned shock at the fact that almost all the Nama prisoners had died on Shark Island, although he had been aware of it for months and had been directly challenged on the subject in the Reichstag only four months earlier.
45
Under pressure, Governor von Lindequist sent a melodramatic telegram to Hintrager demanding, in unusually imperious language, that his deputy ‘Send, immediately, an official report outlining what the government knew about the conditions on Shark Island and also why nothing was done and why it was not reported to Berlin.’
46
Von Lindequist, who had just been promised the post of Deputy Head of the Colonial Department, surely feared that the revelations about Shark Island might wreck his career. Yet the Shark Island scandal was in the end a short-lived and rather half-hearted affair.

The official report was compiled and edited by Oskar Hintrager, despite the fact that he was one of the main architects of Shark Island. It absolved the colonial government of all blame and claimed that they had done everything, ‘to improve the plight of the natives [on Shark Island]’. Hintrager maintained that the prisoners had had ‘enough foodstuffs’ and ‘as much as possible the needs of the natives were met’.
47
Not only was Hintrager’s investigation a whitewash, but the Acting Head of the Colonial Department responsible for accessing it was von Lindequist, who had been temporarily promoted while his superior, Bernhardt Dernburg, made an official tour of South-West Africa – which included an inspection of the now defunct camp on Shark Island.

Although von Lindequist, Hintrager, Dernburg and the politicians in Berlin explained away what had happened on Shark Island, Ludwig von Estorff was unable to forget. Shortly before he died on 5 October 1943, he wrote in his memoirs: ‘Lindequist had seen the horrible effects of the concentration camps on the Boer families in South Africa. The same happened here … Trotha had begun the evil work and Lindequist had finished it. I could only stand aside, sad but powerless to do anything about it.’
48

The exact number of those who died on Shark Island will
never be known. Throughout the concentration camps, the system of reporting deaths was haphazard and at times anecdotal. Indeed the recording of deaths on Shark Island began only in April 1906, and the deaths of many hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand, Herero prisoners who had been on the island before that date were not included in the official statistics.

According to the records that do exist, by March 1907 at least 1,203 Nama prisoners had died on the island. Of these 460 were women and 274 children.
49
In the month of December 1906 alone, 263 prisoners died, an average of 8.5 per day. In late October 1907, Major von Estorff estimated that more than 1,900 Nama had died on Shark Island.
50
These figures do not include the deaths of the Herero prisoners who were on Shark Island long before the arrival of the Nama. Missionary Laaf claimed they died in similar numbers.

The Africans who met their deaths on Shark Island were not the only victims of the Lüderitz camp system. Another concentration camp, run by the railway company Firma Lenz, also reported extremely high death rates. In total, perhaps as many as three or four thousand Africans died in the Lüderitz camps, a figure four times the German population of Lüderitz in 1907.
51

According to a census carried out by Deputy Governor Hintrager in 1908, there were a total of thirteen thousand Nama alive in the colony at the beginning of that year; the pre-war Nama population had been around twenty thousand. Of the Nama who rose up against the Germans in 1904 – estimated at anywhere between five and ten thousand people – around 2,400 were sent into the concentration camp system; only around five hundred of them were alive when the camps were closed down. By 1909, only 248, just over 10 percent of those who had been imprisoned, remained alive.
52

For some Nama communities, the extermination had been almost total. In October 1907 Major von Estorff reported that ‘there are no longer any Veldschoendragers left’. The Witbooi had been nearly wiped out, and of the Bethanie Nama who joined the Witbooi against the Germans, less than a hundred
were alive by 1909.
53

The Herero, whose pre-war population had been estimated at around eighty thousand, had been similarly decimated. Those who survived the concentration camps were formally released by the Kaiser on his birthday in January 1908, a little over four years since the beginning of the uprising. Despite the Kaiser’s orders, many Herero were not released immediately. Some camps were kept open until April 1908 to allow the authorities access to Herero labour in order that the Lüderitz to Keetmanshoop railway – the last major infrastructure project for which forced Herero labour was required – could be almost completed. According to the colonial census, only 16,363 Herero remained in the colony in 1908; 5,373 of them were children, many of whom had been born in the concentration camps, some as a result of rape. Eighty percent of the Herero nation had been killed or driven out of the colony.

Around a thousand Herero, including Samuel Maharero, had managed to escape into British Bechuanaland. Exiled from their homelands, they eked out a meagre existence. Although some were allowed to settle in a reserve at the eastern edge of the Kalahari, poverty forced many to seek work in the gold mines of the Transvaal. An unknown number found refuge in the Owambo lands to the north.