The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism

German concentration camps in Namibia: a pre-cursor to those of WW2, 10 July 2015

This review is from: The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism (Paperback)
An extremely well-written account of an event of which I certainly was unaware - namely the appalling treatment of the native peoples of German S W Africa (now Namibia) in the early years of the 20th century. Based on the Kaiser's desire to create 'lebensraum' - space for the Aryan race to flourish, separate from the 'natives' - the German colonists created horrific concentration camps, notably that of Shark Island, near Luderitz.
But the author's don't confine themselves to relating African history; after explaining the German situation show more from WW1 to the disintegration of the country in its wake, and the rise of the Third Reich, they go on to draw parallels between the racial discrimination that was used to justify the treatment of natives in Africa, and that later used against Slavs and Jews.

"So much of what took place in German SW Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century horribly prefigures the events of the 1940s: concentration camps, the bureaucratisation of killing, meticulous record-keeping of death tolls and death rates, the use of work as a means of extermination, civilians transported in cattle trucks then worked to death, their remains experimented upon by race scientists, and the identification of ethnic groups who had a future of slaves and those who had no future of any sort."

A shocking book, yet written in a very readable style, and I learned so much, both about African and European history. show less

Nazism wasn't a 20th century aberration; its ideas and practices were tested in German SW Africa (Namibia) decades earlier. Genocide against the Hereros and Nama; the first death camps at Shark Island (Lüderitz) and Swakopmund; Hermann Göring's father was the first imperial commissioner; Hitler's Brown Shirts were so named because they wore schutztruppe surplus uniform; race scientists studied the remains of victims, etc., etc. As someone who loves and thought he knew Namibia, this is an eye-opener...

A thoroughly researched, compelling, and accessible history of a near-forgotten genocide and its links to the Holocaust.