The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism

400 Pages·2010·6.3 MB·English

by  David Olusoga

THE KAISER’S HOLOCAUST
Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and
the Colonial Roots of Nazism

DAVID OLUSOGA
and
CASPER W. ERICHSEN
Dedicated to the memory of
Jørn Wulff
Karen Wulff
&
Olorunjube Franklin Ojomo
Table of Contents

Title Page
Dedication
Maps
INTRODUCTION
1: The World behind the Fog
2: The Iron Chancellor and the Guano King
3: ‘This Is My Land’
4: Soldier of Darkness
5: ‘European Nations Do Not Make War in That Way’
6: ‘A Piece of Natural Savagery’
7: King of the Huns
8: ‘Rivers of Blood and Money’
9: ‘Death through Exhaustion’
10: ‘Peace Will Spell Death for Me and My Nation’
11: ‘You Yourselves Carry the Blame for Your Misery’
12: The Island of Death
13: ‘Our New Germany on African Soil’
14: Things Fall Apart
15: ‘To Fight the World for Ever’
16: A Passing Corporal
17: A People without Space
18: Germany’s California
EPILOGUE
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
About the Author
Copyright
Plates

INTRODUCTION

Cell 5

At 10.30 p.m. on 14 October 1946, Private Harold F. Johnson of ‘C’ Company,
26th US Infantry, walked along the corridor leading to Cell 5. Taking up the
position he was to occupy for the next few hours, he leaned forward and peered
through the viewing hole into the cell. ‘At that time’, Johnson later informed a
Board of Inquiry, the prisoner was ‘lying flat on his back with his hands
stretched out along his sides above the blankets. He stayed in that position for
about five minutes without so much as moving.’ At about 10.40, Johnson
informs us, the captive man ‘brought his hands across his chest with his fingers
laced and turned his head to the wall … He lay there for about two or three
minutes … Later he seemed to stiffen and made a blowing, choking sound
through his lips’. Private Johnson raised the alarm. He shouted for the Corporal
of the Relief, Lieutenant Cromer, who ran noisily down the spiral staircase from
the corridor above, quickly followed by the Prison Chaplain, Captain Henry F.
Gerecke. Only when all three were assembled did Johnson unlock and swing
open the cell door. Cromer rushed past and was the first inside, followed by the
Chaplain; Johnson came in behind ‘holding the light’. Chaplain Gerecke leaned
down and grasped hold of the prisoner’s right arm, which hung limply over the
edge of his metal bunk. He searched frantically for a pulse. ‘Good Lord,’ he said,
‘this man is dead.’1
The prisoner who lay in Cell 5 of the Nuremberg Prison, with shards of glass
from an ampoule of cyanide still in his mouth, had once been Prime Minister of
Prussia and President of the Reichstag. He was the former Commander-in-Chief
of the most feared air force in Europe and a ruthless administrator who had
overseen the deadly exploitation of Eastern Europe. He considered himself – as
he had boasted to his jailers only weeks earlier – a ‘historical figure’, and was
convinced that ‘in fifty or sixty years’ statues in his image would be erected all
across Germany. He was Hermann Göring, and in the last twist of his strange life
he had cheated the hangman, committing suicide just two hours before his
execution.
Seven months earlier, in one of the opening addresses of the Trial of German
Major War Criminals, one of the American prosecutors, Robert Kemper, had
described the Nuremberg Trials as ‘the greatest history seminar ever’. The case
for the prosecution was in itself a monumental piece of historical research.
Outside the chamber, a team of historians, translators, archivists and
documentary filmmakers had assembled to catalogue and file, estimate and
quantify the litany of aggression and murderous criminality committed during
the twelve years of Hitler’s ‘Thousand-Year Reich’. From millions of individual
tragedies, they had formed a prosecution case. The documents linking these
crimes to the twenty-three accused men had been duplicated, indexed and
translated into French, Russian and English. The indictment alone ran to twenty-
four thousand words. The preparation of the case for the prosecution could
perhaps have lasted longer than Nazi rule itself. As it was, the first three days of
the trial were entirely taken up just reading the indictment into the official
record.
Over the course of the trial, the defendants were condemned by the records
from their pasts. Their own signatures, on their own documents, were submitted
against them. The minutes of incriminating meetings they had attended were
recited to them; their speeches and edicts read, sometimes shouted, back at them.
Those who had escaped their prisons and concentration camps recounted their
appalling stories. Perhaps at no other time and in no other place has the work of
historians and archivists been put to such dramatic effect. In our time, only the
Truth and Reconciliation Committees of post-Apartheid South Africa have come
close to replicating the drama of Nuremberg.
What happened at Nuremberg between November 1945 and October 1946
was more than a trial: it was the elaborate centrepiece of an enormous act of
national exorcism. The Allied powers believed that the prosecution of the
surviving members of the Nazi elite would be a key step in the ‘de-Nazification’
of the German people. The post-war settlement was, in part, predicated upon the
willingness of Germany’s battered and exhausted population to reject Nazism.
With every major city in ruins, five million Germans dead and four armies of
occupation on German soil, all but the most fanatically pro-Nazi were willing to
acknowledge that the Third Reich had been an unparalleled national calamity.
When confronted at Nuremberg with the stark truth of what Germany had done
under the Nazis, some came to other conclusions. The Nazi leaders in the dock,
and the thousands of henchmen who had enacted their decrees, came to be seen
as ‘other’. Their actions had showed them to be inhumane; perhaps, therefore,
they were unhuman. Led by such men, the Third Reich had been capable of
crimes that were both terrible and unique in history. Nazism, so the argument
went, had been an aberration in European history, a discontinuity.
This is the great post-war myth: the comforting fantasy that the Nazis were a
new order of monsters and that their crimes were without precursor or precedent.
They were not. Much of Nazi ideology and many of the crimes committed in its
name were part of a longer trend within European history. Nazism was both a
culmination and a distortion of decades of German and European history and
philosophy. It was, in part, the final homecoming of theories and practices that
Europeans had developed and perfected in far-flung corners of the world during
the last phase of imperial conquest. There is nothing within that historical
subsoil that made the ultimate flowering of Nazism inevitable, but there is much
that makes it understandable. At Nuremberg, however, all such historical
precedent was plunged into darkness. ‘The greatest history seminar ever’ did not
look back far enough into history.

The Nuremberg Trials took as their start date the year in which a new age of
barbarism had seemed to overwhelm Europe – 1914. This was year zero for the
prosecuting nations, all of whom agreed that World War I had been the calamity
that set Europe on course for the greater tragedies of World War II. The
generation who had mutilated their own continent had, in the process, been
disfigured politically and ideologically. The national enmities and the trauma of
mass, mechanised killing had sown the seeds for the savagery that lay at the
heart of Nazism. At Nuremberg, everything before the Somme, Verdun and
Ypres was regarded as mere detail, as it was presumed that Nazism as an
ideology had emerged fully formed from the chaos and resentment following
Germany’s defeat in 1918.
In its narrow historical focus, if in no other way, the trial of Hermann Göring
was typical. When questioning began, on the morning of 13 March, Göring was
asked for a ‘short account of his life up to the outbreak of the First World War’.
The president of the court repeatedly stressed the need for brevity. It was only
when Göring’s account reached 1914 that he was encouraged to elaborate and
detailed questioning began.2 Over the course of the 218-day trial, Hermann
Göring, the lead defendant, delivered only four sentences about his life before
World War I and the role of his family in Germany’s longer history.
Had the Nuremberg prosecutors looked further into Göring’s past, and his
nation’s, they would have discovered another story of death camps and racial
genocide. They would have seen that the ideas of many of the philosophers,
scientists and soldiers whose theories inspired Hitler had underpinned an earlier,
forgotten holocaust. Perhaps they might have recognised a continuity in German
history and understood that Nazism was anything but unique. They might also
have grasped the importance of the few sentences Göring uttered at the start of
his cross-examination, in which he described his family background and the
world before 1914 that had formed him and his generation.
Göring, for his own reasons, was determined to use his last stand in the dock
at Nuremberg as an opportunity to place the Third Reich within the mainstream
of world history. One strand of his defence strategy was to claim that Nazism
and the principles on which it had been founded were not unique but merely
Germanic incarnations of the same forces with which the prosecuting powers
had built up their own empires and expanded their own power.
On the second day of direct examination by his defence counsel Dr Otto
Stahmer, Göring was asked for his definition of the term Lebensraum – the
theory of living space on which the Nazis’ invasion of the USSR and their plans
for its later colonisation had been founded. He replied: ‘That concept is a very
controversial one. I can fully understand that the Powers – I refer only to the four
signatory Powers – who call more than three-quarters of the world their own
explain this concept differently’.3
Speaking a few days later in Cell 5 to G. M. Gilbert, the psychiatrist given
access to the Nuremberg defendants, Göring directly compared the crimes he
was defending in court with those perpetrated in the empires of the victor
nations. The British Empire, he claimed, had ‘not been built up with due regard
for principles of humanity’, while America had ‘hacked its way to a rich
Lebensraum by revolution, massacre and war’.4
Göring’s attempts to compare the crimes of the Third Reich to the genocides
and massacres of the age of empire could easily be dismissed as a desperate
defence tactic. But behind the bluster, arrogance and amorality of a man who
was patently unable to confront his own crimes, there is an uncomfortable truth.
When Göring was asked to speak briefly about his life before 1914, he
outlined what he called ‘a few points which are significant with relation to my
later development’. He told the court of his father, who had been the ‘first
Governor of SouthWest Africa’, pointing out that in that capacity the elder
Göring had had ‘connections at that time with two British statesmen, Cecil
Rhodes and the elder Chamberlain’.5
Hermann Göring’s father, Dr Heinrich Göring, had indeed been a key factor in
his son’s ‘later development’. In 1885 he had been appointed by Chancellor