The German Konzentrationslager and the Debates about the Annihilation of the Herero, 1905–1908

Abstract

As I have discussed since Chapter 1, debates still rage about how best to remember and record the colonial histories of the nation of Namibia, and there are those who contend that at one time German colonizers engaged in an intentional rassenkampf (race war) that almost wiped out large segments of the indigenous Herero, Nama, Damara, and San populations of German South-West Africa.2 Although it may be possible that many more people died in “Weyler’s” Spanish camps, and British negligence may have contributed to the extremely high mortality and morbidity rates in the Boer and African camps, the German camps have sometimes been singled out for attention because their labor camps have been viewed as punitive facilities that kept alive “annihilationist” policies. In other words, other colonial camp systems were deployed to separate colonial rebels from the populations that supported them, but more than a few scholars today argue that the German camps were uniquely problematic in that they were set up to deter the Herero and Nama and break the back of indigenous resistance to colonial rule. Tens of thousands of Africans in German South-West Africa literally worked themselves to death or died from exposure, and some researchers go as far as to call this the “Kaiser’s Holocaust,” because the colonial administrators and their civilian and military superiors in Berlin knew about horrific conditions in the camps.3