• JOACHIM ZELLER So much has been researched about the ‘pacification wars’ of the German Reich against the Herero and Nama in Namibia (the former colony German-South West Africa) that one might think that everything has been said about it for the time being.
All the more reason for Matthias Häussler’s study to attract attention. Häussler concentrates on the German-Herero war and the events of 1904.
The author had access to one of the most important sources, namely the handwritten ‘war diary’ of the infamous commander of the South-west African protection force (Schutztruppe), lieutenant general Lothar von Trotha. To date, only three historians have been able to view this largely unknown document, as the Von Trotha family has very limited access to the document stored in their family archives.
The initial question of the historical-sociological work does not refer to whether the colonial war ended in genocide, but to how the escalation of violence led to genocide.
The author is not only interested in the violence ‘from above’, that of the colonial state and its representatives. In particular, he turns to violence ‘from below’, which means the ‘privatised violence’ of the white settler society.
Already before 1904, in ‘times of peace’, a ‘despotism of the white conquering class’ had developed. The war brought with it a further normalisation of violence.
With the outbreak of the war at the beginning of 1904, the failure of the ‘peace policy’ of long-time governor Theodor Leutwein had become apparent. His longstanding concern was to make the Herero ‘politically dead’. The Herero, like the other ‘natives’, were to be expropriated as subaltern workers in the economy controlled by the whites and their property. Häussler therefore attributes the Leutwein policy approach to a form of ethnocide.
After the dismissal of Leutwein, Von Trotha, the personal favourite of the emperor, was appointed his successor and commander-in-chief of the Schutztruppe. The small warfare of his predecessor was out of the question for Von Trotha as he categorically ruled out negotiations with the Herero. Von Trotha had in mind an extermination battle that would bring the campaign to a successful conclusion in one fell swoop.
But the war of annihilation Von Trotha waged in the beginning was seen by Häussler as a political war. He refuses to equate the use of the term ‘war of annihilation’ with a genocidal war of annihilation.
Incidentally, this also applies to the concept of ‘racial warfare’ that Von Trotha propagated. The social Darwinist topoi ‘racial struggle’ seems to prove the supposed continuity to the ‘racial wars’ of Nazi Germany as a matter of course. But no matter how limited Von Trotha’s fantasies of violence may have been, this does not prove that his command in the colony from the outset amounted to a genocidal racial war.
Häussler also sees no genocidal warfare in the planning of the ‘battle’ at Waterberg in August 1904 – the Herero speak of the Hamakari battle – but rather conventional warfare. The fact that Von Trotha planned prison camps for 8 000 prisoners before the battle at Waterberg makes this conclusion plausible. In doing so, he contradicts the older thesis that Von Trotha had planned the Battle of Waterberg from the outset to drive the Herero into the waterless Omaheke in order to make the semi-desert his weapon.
But Von Trotha should fail miserably with his goal of a ‘total victory’. However, he could not admit his disgraceful failure at the Battle of Waterberg and defiantly sent victory reports to Berlin. Following this finding, the author develops the central thesis of his book: The genocide of the Herero was not planned long ago, but resulted from the failure of the original plans. In this view, the genocide appears to be the sad climax of a ‘campaign of disappointments’, a view that has not been accepted in Namibian research to date.
According to Häussler, the infamous proclamation of Von Trotha to the Herero from the beginning of October 1904 was more of a sign of terrorism, although the proclamation had a genocidal tendency from the beginning. It was meant above all as a threat against the Herero in order to persuade them to give up or to keep them away from German territory.
Häussler, however, does not forget to point out that, legally speaking, the proclamation already constitutes a crime against humanity and genocide. The ‘genocidal moment’ would not have occurred until the ordered persecution actions of the Schutztruppe had literally got stuck in the sand of the Omaheke.
The excessiveness of the use of force was therefore not so much an expression of an increasingly clear eliminationist and racist intention to annihilate. Rather, it grew out of Von Trotha’s fear of appearing weak in public. Since the genocide of the Herero under Von Trotha’s military dictatorship was by and large committed by a regular army, Häussler states a state crime in the broadest sense.
Häussler shines with an innovative study in which he analyses Von Trotha’s strategy, which consists of the triad of subjugation, expulsion and extermination. Häussler’s criticism of the exaggerated intentionalism of the prevailing genocide research and of his all too frivolous deduction from the results of the campaign of his plant cannot be dismissed in view of his results. Even if the author sets the time of the turning into a genocide much later, he nevertheless notes that the exact determination of the ‘genocidal moment’ is not so important, if at all possible.
The book is recommended not only to all those who are committed to dealing appropriately with the Namibian-German past, but also to those who are directly involved in the ongoing bilateral negotiations between Germany and Namibia, in order to come to terms with the genocide of 1904 to 1908. A translation to English is planned.
