Book review: The Kasier's Holocaust

Published on Wednesday 14 July 2010 10:33

THE KAISER'S HOLOCAUST David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen Faber & Faber, £20

SHARK Bay, near the twee small town of Lderitz, Namibia, is renowned for its fine seafood restaurants and scuba diving. It is also the site of the world's first death camp, as attested by the human bones and manacles frequently washed up there. It is this sordid "historical subsoil" which David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen excavate in this important book.

Nazi genocide, they argue, did not find its origins in the carnage of the Great War and the "injustice" of the Versailles peace treaty: it was pioneered by the Kaiser's representatives in German South-West Africa. The first Imperial Commissioner, one Dr Heinrich Goering, and his successors, armed with Social Darwinist ideas and the newest weapons, attempted to carve out "living space" for the Vlk. In the way of their exterminatory project stood the Herero and Nama peoples, whose military and diplomatic nous belied their status as "savages". Literate and deeply Christian, the native elites fascinated and perturbed visitors to the Berlin Colonial Show of 1896. But the brute force of the colonial Schutztruppe prevailed, and the defeated tribes would be cast into the desert or worked to death on Shark Island. Their severed heads would find their way into the medical departments of German universities.

However, in 1915, the British army dispossessed the Kaiser of this colony, and in 1919 a "Blue Book" shocked the civilised world with its meticulous description of the German genocide. Such a defeat only spurred on the Nazis in their own genocidal quest for Lebenstraum in Eastern Europe. The Nuremberg Trials would offer another history seminar on the inhumanity of racial imperialism. But the "civilised" world could be profoundly hypocritical.

As Heinrich Goering's son argued at Nuremburg, before biting on a cyanide pill, the Germans had been following the example of their colonial rivals, who themselves had used extreme force against "inferior" races. And at the end of this magnificent and provocative study, Olusoga and Erichsen show how white solidarity led to the recall and destruction of all publicly available copies of the "Blue Book".

Today, in an independent but divided Namibia, Herero and Nama survivors keep their culture and tragic memory alive, while tourists in replica Schutztruppe hats, exploring the dunes on their quad bikes, run over bleached bones and tattered Victorian clothes.