Herero Genocide

The occurrences during what has come to be known as the Herero and Namaqua Genocide were brutal and have been seen as the first attempts at genocide. This piece will analyse the issue at large and also two primary sources relating to this tragedy in an attempt to shed light on the subject of the Herero situation in particular. Firstly, to properly contextualise and analyse the two documents, we have to look at who wrote the documents themselves.

The author of both documents was Lothar von Trotha, a German military commander and General who was sent to German South West Africa in 1904 to crush a rebellion against the German occupation by the Herero, natives to the land that the Germans inhabited.

Lothar von Trotha was an esteemed German soldier and commander and specialised in the suppression of insurrection in German colonial territories having served in China and German East Africa in a similar capacity. Trotha’s mission in German South West Africa was to put a stop to the uprising by the native African tribe, the Herero, that was caused by German occupancy of Herero land.

In January 1904, the Herero had risen up against the German colonialists under the leadership of Samuel Maharero. After initial defeats and setbacks against the Africans, the Germans deployed Trotha who had successful experience in situations such as these and he arrived in German South West Africa in June 1904. After initial defeats, Trotha won a decisive victory at the Battle of Waterberg in August 1904 and succeeded in expelling or killing the majority of the Herero from German territory.

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This is the historical and contextual background to the letters sent by Trotha in early to mid October of 1904, two months after the Battle of Waterberg and following German victory in German South West Africa. The addressees of the documents differ between each one. The first document, Command of the Protective Troops, is addressed to Germans in German South West Africa and is used to show the current status of the Herero, as subjects of extermination. The document is also used to show the

Germans what Trotha has made known to the Herero of their plight, it is an aggressive move by Trotha with obvious flirtations to a direct order to kill every Herero on sight, “within the German borders every Herero, with or without a gun, with or without cattle will be shot, I will not receive any women or children, drive them back to their People and I will also let them be shot at”. The second document is addressed to Alfred von Schlieffen, famed German strategist and Chief of the Imperial German General Staff.

The purpose of this document is to explain that Trotha intends to finish off the Herero population (“I believe that the nation as such should be eliminated”) as well as the reasons which he is using to justify their extermination (“my intimate knowledge of African tribes has… convinced me of the necessity that the Negro does not respect treaties but only brute force… I find it most appropriate that the nation perishes instead of infecting our soldiers and diminishing their supplies of food and water” ). Trotha’s mentioning of the Herero as no longer being the subjects of the Germans can be taken a few ways.

Perhaps most obviously, it can be construed as meaning that since the Herero nation will be destroyed that the Herero will not survive to be subjects of the German people. He also uses the term to denote that the Herero were once ‘worthy subjects’ of the Germans however through acts of crime and weakness (“they have murdered, stolen, have cut off wounded soldiers’ ears and noses and other body parts and now do not want to fight anymore because of cowardice” ) have lost the apparent privilege of being German subjects.

Document one, the “Annihilation Order”, can be seen as ordering the deaths of all the Herero, however it can be said that the ‘annihilation’ in mind was not of the people but rather that of their unity or nationhood. Trotha makes multiple references to the Herero “nation” and its destruction as well as not only killing the Herero but simply driving them off German land, into unoccupied territories well out of German sight and mind.

It can also be said that Trotha was most certainly focussed on the destruction of the Herero population as history saw that when his armies drove the Herero out of German zones, watering holes and wells were poisoned so that wandering Herero tribesmen would drink the water and die from the toxins. The two documents analysed in this report do not give us a good indication of the damage that the Germans did to the Herero population in the end if any at all.

They are merely contemporary documents of the Herero uprising of 1904 which bring to light the attitudes of the German command and are documents which can only be fully appreciated with a broader context of the issue at hand, thus these two documents are useless in ascertaining the severity and even the existence of the Herero and Namaqua Genocide. Bibliography Erichsen, Casper W. , “A Forgotten History-Concentration Camps were used by Germans in South West Africa”, in Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg) 17 August 2001. Gewald, Jan-Bart, “Herero Heroes.

A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia 1890-1923”. 1999, pp290-296 Trotha, Lothar von. “Command of the Protective Troops. ” Federal Archive Germany R 1001/2089, 02/10/1904 <http://www. bundesarchiv. de/aktuelles/aus_dem_archiv/galerie/00061/index. html? inde x=0&id=2&nr=5#>, Accessed: 1 Aug 2008 Trotha, Lothar von. “German commander Lothar von Trotha explaining his motivations in a letter to German Chief of General Staff von Schlieffen, Oct. 4 1904. “Herero Heroes. A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia 1890-1923. 1999, pp173