The Kaiser's Holocaust by Casper Erichsen

Author:Casper Erichsen [David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571269488
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2010-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

Von Lindequist informed the Nama that they would suffer the same fate as the Herero, as punishment for the ‘crimes’. ‘You will be sent to work,’ he warned them, ‘and I advise you: work hard and follow the instructions of those who give them to you in my name.’20

With thousands of Herero and Nama in captivity, von Lindequist’s civilian administration set about exploiting the labour of the Africans more intensely than had ever been attempted by von Trotha. Under von Lindequist, forced labour became the defining feature of the concentration-camp system and the main cause of its pathology. Von Lindequist’s regime was so calamitous for the Herero and Nama that it can be considered a continuation of their extermination, by non-military means.

In Windhoek, the four thousand Herero already in the camps had been deployed in the construction of new government buildings, private homes, and even a villa for Deputy Governor Oskar Hintrager. However, it was the construction of the railways, by far the biggest public-works project attempted in the colony, that became the engine driving the whole concentration-camp system.

By 1906 two railway projects were well under way. The first ran between Swakopmund and the mines at Otavi in the north, the second between Lüderitz and the inland settlement of Aus in the south. Seven thousand Herero, spread across the colony, were already working outside the formal concentration camps, most of them on the railways. Many were housed in special mobile pens that moved along with the progress of the tracks, deeper into the desert or further into the bush.

The constant need for new labour on the railways encouraged the Germans to raid the Herero collection stations. So pressing was the demand for labour that the Germans even refused to allow the Herero enough time to recover from the effects of malnutrition. In early 1906, when work began on the Lüderitz to Aus railway, the colonial authorities ordered Missionary Kuhlmann at Omburo to send prisoners directly to the railways. He was specifically ordered to send as many as possible, the sick as well as the healthy, the old as well as the young.21

The work, especially the laying of the heavy steel rails and prefabricated steel sleepers, was extremely hard labour. Like the prisoners in the concentration camps, the forced labourers on the railways were inadequately fed and poorly housed. They were also routinely abused by their guards. Traugott Tjienda, a Herero man working on the Otavi railway, gave this statement describing the conditions:

We were not paid for our work, we were regarded as prisoners. I worked for two years without pay … The soldiers guarded us at night in big compounds made of thorn bushes … women were compounded with the men. They were made to do manual labour as well. They did not carry the heavy rails, but they had to load and unload wagons and trucks and to work with picks and shovels … [Our women] were compelled to cohabit with soldiers and white railway labourers. The fact that a woman was married was no protection.

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