Germany forced to face up to ‘forgotten genocide’ in Africa
FRANZ RITTER VON EPP arrived in Africa as an ambitious young infantry officer in 1904. Over the next two years, he took part in a campaign of racial extermination that left 100,000 dead.
Tens of thousands were driven into the desert to die of dehydration. Others perished in concentration camps.
Almost 30 years later, as Nazi governor of Bavaria, he would preside over the establishment of the first concentration camp in Germany at Dachau, and the deportation of thousands of Jews to the death camps of the Holocaust. Von Epp is one of the figures explored in an art exhibition opening in Hamburg today, which aims to shine a light on Germany’s forgotten genocide.
Thirty years before the Holocaust, between 1904 and 1908, German colonial troops in Africa attempted to exterminate the Herero and Nama peoples of what is now Namibia. It was the first genocide of the 20th century.
Many of the features that would later become synonymous with Nazi Germany were there: concentration camps, race theory, twisted scientific experiments and mass slaughter. But it is the genocide modern Germany would rather not talk about.
While the country has confronted its historic responsibility for the Holocaust, for decades the genocide in Africa was swept under the carpet.
Angela Merkel’s government finally recognised the killing as a genocide in 2016. But it has not formally apologised and has refused to pay reparations.
Unser Afrika, or “Our Africa”, aims to change that. The exhibition is being hosted by the Hamburg regional government in what some are seeing as a direct challenge to Mrs Merkel.
Marc Erwin Babej, a 48-year-old German-american art photographer, took a team of models to the genocide sites in Namibia to try to uncover what led the German colonial troops to try to exterminate the Herero and Nama peoples. The exhibition explores how the colonialists wanted to build a German utopia in Africa, without considering the people already living there.
Mr Babej’s mother and grandmother were Holocaust survivors, and his own German-jewish identity played a role, he said.
“As the son and grandson of Holocaust survivors, I’m a descendant of the victims. But when it comes to the Herero and Nama genocide, as a German I’m a descendant of the perpetrators.”
Prof Jürgen Zimmerer of Hamburg University, an expert on the genocide, said: “Nazi policies of eastward expansion and Lebensraum [territorial expansion] bear a striking similarity to settler colonialism. In my understanding, Nazi expansionism was a second German attempt to create a colonial empire, this time in the east.”
But Germany has been slow to recognise the impact of its actions. “It was only in 2016 that the German government gave up its resistance to using the term genocide,” said Prof Zimmerer.
But things are beginning to change. Earlier this year, councillors agreed to rename streets in Berlin’s “African Quarter” named after colonial figures.
More significantly, Germany is facing a class-action lawsuit in New York brought by descendants of the genocide victims.
If the court decides in their favour, it could set a precedent for cases to be brought in the US against other former colonial powers – including the UK.