I You We Them by Dan Gretton

Author:Dan Gretton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473518001
Publisher: Random House

In the rare cases when they did find a trace of water – maybe twenty-five to thirty feet below the desert – chaos usually ensued, with thirst-crazed people crushing each other to reach the water, often being buried alive in the process as these improvised wells collapsed. The German Official History of the Battle of Waterberg ends with the chilling statement I first came across in the late 1990s: ‘The month-long sealing of desert areas, carried out with iron severity, completed the work of annihilation. The death rattles of the dying and their insane screams of fury … resounded in the sublime silence of infinity.’

But von Trotha has not finished yet. He remains utterly unmoved by all reports of such suffering. In fact, he wants the extermination to be even more thorough. On one occasion, when he accompanies one of the pursuit patrols, they find two elderly Herero women, exhausted by an old waterhole – von Trotha promptly orders both to be shot. On another occasion he questions a young woman survivor and then orders her to be killed. There are other eyewitness accounts of German soldiers tossing a baby Herero boy on the bayonets of their rifles, of women and children packed into a thorn enclosure, doused with lamp oil and then burnt alive.

Seven weeks after the Battle of Waterberg, von Trotha is still urging the German 1st Field Regiment through the Omaheke in pursuit of the last remnants of the fleeing Herero. Almost one hundred miles south-east of the Waterberg, he and his soldiers pause at the last known waterhole, deep inside the desert, at a clearing called Osombo zo Windimbe. Just after dawn on 3 October 1904, von Trotha reads out a proclamation to all his troops, including Franz von Epp. It remains one of the most disturbing statements in the entire history of genocide. The proclamation was written down and subsequently translated into Otjiherero and distributed widely. A single copy of the original proclamation has survived, and is held today in the Botswana National Archives in Gaberone. It is titled Vernichtungsbefehl (‘Extermination Order’):

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