Concentration camp in German South West Africa

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The Haifischinsel with the camp in Lüderitz Bay before 1910

Concentration camps in German South West Africa were set up by the German Empire in the former colony of German South West Africa after the Herero and Nama uprising in 1904 .

General

The term “ concentration camp ” was officially used in the German-speaking area for the first time in 1904/05 to denote internment and assembly camps for captured Herero and Nama . This term was "invented" or coined by the British field marshal and politician Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener : During the Second Boer War against the Boers of Dutch origin in South Africa around 1900, the women and children of the Boer population, who were considered potential enemies, were in Camps that were officially known as concentration camps were combined and interned.

internment

Captive Herero, ca.1904

The captured insurgents, men and women, were interned in concentration camps and some of them were used for forced labor . As early as 1904, prison camps were set up in Okahandja , Windhoek and Swakopmund . In the further course of the war, more or less permanent or open camps were added in almost all parts of the country.

The city of Swakopmund, as well as the Lüderitz Bay with the Shark Island , today officially Shark Island , had offered itself to the construction of a prison camp due to the limited escape opportunities. On the northern tip of the island, those responsible had set up a camp for several hundred Herero as early as 1905. As far as healthy, they were used to work in Lüderitz Bay during the day and brought back to Shark Island in the evening.

Conditions in the camps

Only with the arrival of 1,700 prisoners of war Witbooi and Bethanien-Nama in May 1906, who were already marked by malnutrition and disease upon arrival, did these circumstances change drastically. Since the number of newcomers was obviously far too high for the island, the camp management demanded immediate remedial action as well as the delivery of food and clothing in order not to endanger the lives of the prisoners. According to this report, numerous Herero died as a result of the local humidity and cold. Shortly after this arrival, the missionary, ethnologist, linguist and historian Heinrich Vedder from the Rheinische Missionsgesellschaft reported very critically about the situation on Shark Island, which, however, left no response at all.

The missionary Emil Laaf, who lived in Lüderitzbucht, tried a new attempt and wrote to the Rheinische Missionsgesellschaft on October 5, 1905:

“A large number of people are sick, mostly from scurvy, and 15-20 die a week. Samuel Izaak, who is my interpreter, recently told me that since March 4th, which day he faced the Germans, 517 of his people had died. Today that number is even greater. Just as many of the Herero die, so that on average one can calculate an average of 50 per week. When will this misery end? The people are well taken care of, both with clothing and provisions; they cannot all eat the latter. But the climate is too unfavorable ... "

It turned out that a number of prisoners could not stand the southern winter with its cold, wet sea climate and, despite sufficient provisions with rice and other staple foods, were often too exhausted and sick to be able to eat the food offered.

After persistent requests from the mission, the commander of the protection force , Colonel Berthold Deimling, decided in December 1906 to at least bring the women and children to the huge former supply camp Burenkamp near Lüderitzbucht.

As one of his first official acts, Deimling's successor, Major Ludwig von Estorff , visited the camp on Shark Island on April 8, 1907. After the worrying reports that had been available to him so far, he now wanted to see the situation for himself and was simply horrified. If people had already died miserably in winter, now, the closer the summer came, the death rates rose even more drastically. It can be assumed that the crowded people died of all those diseases from which the German troops also suffered: scurvy and epidemics such as typhus and dysentery , which were difficult to diagnose and combat at the time. The problem in Swakopmund was exacerbated by the drinking water there, which was infected with pathogens and the fact that the Germans were unable to secure supplies for the prisoners.

On the day of his visit to the island, v. Estorff on April 10th to the command of the protection troops in Berlin that he had ordered the prisoners to be transported to the mainland in order to alleviate the situation. The head of the colonial department of the Federal Foreign Office, Colonial Director Bernhard Dernburg , requested a detailed report and agreed to Estorffs' measures. In Windhoek, von Estorff met with less approval. As he stated in his reply telegram to the Foreign Office, Hintrager, who was appointed governor, had asked him to bring the Herero " back to the island, pointing out that England had 10,000 Let women and children die in camps. "

On April 26, 1907, following Dernburg's demands, the Lüderitzbucht district office wrote a detailed report on the state of health and the number of prisoners with their wives and children now being transferred from Shark Island to the mainland. Then it becomes clear that on April 24, 1907 of the 573 surviving Nama 123 people were so seriously ill that only death was to be expected. Of the remaining 450 people, 50 percent of the men, 25 percent of the women and 25 percent of the children were ill and had some prospects of a cure.

Despite these measures, men and women of the Herero, Witbooi- and Bethanier-Nama who had recovered, just as at the time of their imprisonment on Shark Island, had to do forced labor in building roads, roads and railways, where they were further exploited in an inhuman way were. Of the 2,014 prisoners from the Haifischinsel camp, 1,359 died between January 1906 and June 1907 during the construction of the southern railway between Lüderitzbucht and Keetmanshoop.

See also

literature

  • Jonas Kreienbaum: “A sad fiasco”. Colonial concentration camps in southern Africa 1900–1908. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2015.
  • Medardus Brehl: "These blacks deserve to die before God and people." The genocide of the Herero in 1904 and its contemporary legitimation. In: Micha Brumlik, Irmtrud Wojak (ed.): Genocide and war crimes in the first half of the 20th century. Campus Verlag, 2004, ISBN 3-593-37282-7 .
  • Mihran Dabag , Horst founder, Uwe-K. Ketelsen: Colonialism, Colonial Discourse and Genocide. Fink, 2004, ISBN 3-7705-4070-0 .
  • Jürgen Zimmerer (Ed.): Genocide in German South West Africa. The colonial war (1904–1908) in Namibia and its consequences. Links Verlag, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-86153-303-0 .
  • D. Olusoga, CW Erichsen: The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide And The Colonial Roots Of Nazism. Faber & Faber, London 2010, ISBN 978-0-571-23141-6 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bundesarchiv Berlin, RKA No. 2140, Bl. 18: Missionar Laaf to Rhenish Mission, August 5, 1906.
  2. ↑ Goethe-Institut: Cultural center opened in von Estorff's Windhoek house ( memento from June 7, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) September 12, 2002
  3. ↑ Bundesarchiv Berlin, RKA No. 2140, Bl. 88: Estorff an Schutztruppe, Berlin, April 10, 1907.
  4. ↑ Bundesarchiv Berlin, RKA No. 2140, p. 94: Estorff to the colonial department of the Foreign Office, Berlin, April 14, 1907.
  5. ↑ BAB, RKA No. 2140, Bl. 111: Report from the Lüderitzbucht district office to the governorate, Windhoek, April 26, 1907.
  6. ^ National Archives Windhoek, File 456 of the Central Bureau of the Gouvernement of German South West Africa, D IV 1.3: Campaign against the Hereros, 1905–1906: Prisoners of War, 1904–1913, Volume 5; taken from: Zimmerer / Zeller, p. 83.