Kaiser's Holocaust (37 page)

Völkisch
fantasists and colonial fanatics like Paul Rohrbach had predicted that the hardships confronting new settlers in Germany’s colonies would transform them into a rugged frontier people. Reconnected to the soil, united by race and culture and away from the moral pollution of Germany’s cities, they would reject the superficiality and materialism of modernity, in favour of traditional modes of life. In reality, however, many of the settlers who came to South-West Africa did their best to replicate the materialism and decadence of modern Germany.

Life in Windhoek, for many of its residents, was far removed from the frontier fantasy. By 1912 the town offered most of the vices and indulgences that
Völkisch
and Pan-German agitators believed settlers would be better off without. Alongside its farm provision stores, Windhoek boasted several lawyers’ practices, a notary, a bookstore, a tailor, two bakeries, eight hotels and two stores selling women’s clothing. In 1912, Clara Brockmann, a famous female settler, enthused, ‘In the large stores of Windhoek one can obtain everything that moves the heart; luxury and extravagance is cultivated even in the elegant, small towns. One lives like in Germany. The social activity is blooming.’ The social life of the German population, now known as the
Süedwester
, had once been limited to campfire gatherings and improvised
Bierkellers
. By 1912 the colony had its own racecourse, bowling alleys and a movie theatre – although most social events were still lubricated by the produce of the colony’s nine breweries and eighty-two bars. The march of progress was by no means restricted to the capital. Swakopmund had been founded in 1892 as a coastal outpost, manned by just nineteen Europeans. By 1909, it had a total of 112 businesses, including barbershops, beauty salons, laundries, a watchmaker and its own newspaper, the
Deutsch Südwestafrikanische Zeitung
.
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In the years before World War I, German South-West Africa was so alluring that even the sight of the Namib Desert and the Skeleton Coast, which had once struck dread into the hearts of hardened sailors, no longer seemed forbidding to prospective settlers. In her popular memoir,
Was Afrika Mir Gab und Nahm
(What Africa Gave To Me and What It Took Away) published in 1909, Margarethe von Eckenbrecher described her first sight of her new homeland, glimpsed from the rails of a steamer en route to Swakopmund:

Another settler, Lydia Höpker, who came to South-West Africa in 1910, described the colony as a paradise. Arriving just two years after the end of the war that had depopulated much of the colony, she was particularly taken by the emptiness of the landscape: ‘Everything was so dewy fresh and untouched, roundabout loneliness [
sic
] and quiet; only from afar did the call of a bird resound now and again. We hiked silently through this beautiful morning. A dreamlike feeling enveloped me, and I felt enchanted, as if in another world.’
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As the number of settlers increased, supporters of colonialism in Germany were able to claim that German South-West Africa was a fully grown colony. Not only had it attracted thousands of settlers, in 1912 exports exceeded imports for the first time. In the context of the German economy as a whole, the figures were almost insignificant, yet even the British Consul, in his report of 1913, reluctantly had to accept that the colony was thriving. Clara Brockmann proudly announced in 1910 that the colony had become ‘Our new Germany on African soil’.
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As enthusiasm for the colonies reached new levels, Germany set out to exploit South-West Africa and her other colonies fully, by establishing of a network of colonial colleges and research institutions. A German Colonial School was founded in Witzenhausen and three-quarters of its graduates went on to apply their skills in Germany’s overseas possessions.
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In Hamburg, the Colonial
Institute taught ‘Ethnology of the German Protectorates’ and ‘Tropical Hygiene’, while the prestigious Berlin School of Commerce offered a course in ‘Colonial Economics’, taught by Dr Paul Rohrbach.

At many institutions, the teaching of undergraduates existed alongside extensive research programmes, many devoted to maximising the productivity of the colonies. To help students from less fortunate backgrounds access careers in the empire, scholarships were established by German companies such as Deutsche Bank and Witzenhausen Steel – both beneficiaries of increased colonial trade and government investment in the new colonial infrastructure.

Graduates of the colonial schools were drawn to the fertile north of German South-West Africa, the territories once owned by the Herero. There, new land could be broken and new methods applied. In the south, however, thousands of new settlers with little interest in farming were attracted by the thought of treasure and prospect of instant wealth.

In 1908 a coloured worker from Cape Town, Zacharius Lewala, had stumbled across a peculiar-looking stone while working on the rail line near Lüderitz. Zacharius, who had previously spent years labouring in the mines of Kimberley in South Africa, immediately recognised it as a raw diamond. Just miles from Lüderitz, in the sands that Adolf Lüderitz had scoured for minerals thirty years earlier, the Germans had uncovered one of the world’s largest deposits of alluvial diamonds.

The discovery of diamonds came at a critical moment for the town of Lüderitz. As the war against the Herero and the Nama had drawn to an end, the army drifted away. The hotels were left empty and the bars fallen silent. ‘It seemed’, wrote a settler, ‘as if Lüderitz was falling back into hibernation.’
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When rumours of diamonds reached Lüderitz, people had run into the streets to rejoice. Within a year, each of the desert hills surrounding the bay had been claimed by competing diamond companies. Hundreds of men groped through the sand or shovelled it into the spinning wire drums of the clarifica tion machines that separated the gems from the worthless rock.

Like all rushes, whether for diamonds, gold or oil, the Lüderitz diamond rush gave birth to folklore. The most enduring legend is that in certain sites it was not even necessary to dig, as the diamonds lay on the surface of the sand. There are stories of one diamond field, located just a few miles north of Lüderitz, in which prospectors would gather at nightfall and wait for the moonlight to pick out the twinkling diamonds that could be grabbed from the sand in handfuls.

The reality of diamond prospecting was not so romantic. The vast bulk of the work was done by black workers imported from the Owambo Kingdoms in the far north. Chained together at the legs, the Owambo were made to crawl across the desert on all fours, fumbling in the burning hot sand for diamonds. They were reduced to this miserable existence by drought and famine in their homelands that forced them to seek work from the Germans. The hardships of the labour itself were aggravated by the brutality of the overseers and their meagre rations. Many of the workers died.

As they criss-crossed the deserts, the Owambo may have discovered more than diamonds. In late 1904 and early 1905, when the death toll on Shark Island began to rise, many bodies had been disposed of in the desert outside Lüderitz. They had been interred in mass graves dug in what the German authorities must have presumed would always be uninhabited wasteland. That wasteland was now diamond fields, and the Owambo labourers were searching for diamonds in areas that contained the remains of Shark Island prisoners. Today two such mass graves have emerged from the sands just outside Lüderitz. Hidden in the still restricted diamond zone, the bones of what are almost certainly victims of the camps lie bleached and exposed in the sun. Abandoned diamond-excavating machines stand a few hundred yards away, half engulfed by the yellow sands of the Namib.

At the height of the diamond rush, the white population of Lüderitz was unconcerned by grim discoveries in the desert. As money began to flow into Lüderitz again, the old boomtown
mentality swiftly returned. The bars reopened and the excesses of the war years were quickly surpassed. For a brief moment Lüderitz became one of the most dynamic places on earth.

Between 1908 and 1913, 52 million marks’ worth of diamonds were discovered in South-West Africa.
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With each find, the excitement mounted and the population of the south swelled. Just a few miles inland from Lüderitz, an entirely new town sprang up in the desert. Kolmanskuppe had a casino, a bowling alley and a spacious meeting hall in which regular vaudeville performers played to a full house. Those who had already made their fortunes built extravagant villas on the edge of the new town, overlooking the diamond fields.

During the diamond rush, the south of the colony was undoubtedly a man’s world. There were tales of hard-living prospectors who made a fortune in an instant, and squandered it in just weeks in the bars and brothels of Lüderitz. Yet while the south did much to revive the wartime legend of the ‘Wild South-West’, the colonial societies and Germany’s foremost colonial experts were struggling to erase that image. In the years leading up to World War I, the economic progress of the colony became inextricably linked with the issue of gender and those responsible for its future sought to remake South-West Africa into a colony that would attract German women. To be a fully productive, ‘racially healthy’ settler society, the south-west needed not just farmers, but farmers’ wives.

The first campaign to encourage women to emigrate to South-West Africa had been launched in 1896, when the German Colonial Society offered free passage to the wives and fiancées of men serving in the colony. In a more overt attempt at social engineering, unmarried women were given free passage and employed as domestic servants. This was regarded as a way for the young women usefully to expend their energies until they found husbands. Clara Brockmann believed that a settler with a
wife worked ten times better than one without, and H. Ladeburg, author of
Die Koloniale Frauenfrage
(The Question of Women in the Colonies), suggested that through ‘marriage with a racial comrade [a male settler will] raise himself not only ethically, but also economically.’
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By 1913 there were three thousand white women in the colony, around a quarter of the total white population. Twenty years earlier there had been fifty-five. However, the campaign to encourage white women to settle in the colony had less to do with increasing agricultural productivity than with demands for
Rassenreinheit
– German racial purity.

German settlers in the south-west, like white settlers across the continent, had for decades taken African and mixed-race women as their concubines. Many had had mixed-race children. A small number had married their African or mixed-race partners and settled down to care for their children; others returned to Germany and abandoned their African families.

The first attempt to stamp out racial mixing was made by Curt von François in 1892. To discourage soldiers in the German garrison from taking up with African women, von François threatened to withhold their rights to a free plot of land in the colony at the end of their service. Despite these sanctions, a number of Germans, both among the settlers and von François’s garrison, continued to live with and marry Africans, particularly women from the mixed-race Rehoboth Baster people.
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Even after German women had begun to arrive in the colony in larger numbers, sexual unions between white settlers and black or mixed-race women continued. The colonial economist Moritz Bonn claimed that ‘the main cause of bastardisation in Africa was not the absence of white women but the presence of black ones’. Yet what truly disturbed Leutwein, and later governors, was not mixed-race couples but mixed-race children. Under German law, the children of German fathers automatically inherited their citizenship. Whether or not the normal rights of citizenship applied to mixed-race offspring became the subject of a complex and protracted legal dispute. Believing it was impossible to prevent white
settlers marrying, cohabiting with or raping African women, Leutwein and his successors tried to prevent their mixed-race offspring being legally defined as Germans.