TheThe Forgotten Holocaust or How Germany killed thousands of Black People

 The Forgotten Holocaust

Or how Germany killed thousands of Black people and hid it from the world until it no longer could

Rebecca Stevens A.

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Jun 9 · 5 min read

Source: Instagram — zimbochic_ Modern-day Herero women in traditional dress in Namibia

Like the Tulsa Race Massacre in America, the horrifying details of Germany’s Black Holocaust have recently come out into the mainstream — meaning that this part of history that was intentionally omitted from history books and what you and I were taught in school, is finally seeing the light of day. Between 1890 and 1915, Germany tortured, sexually exploited, conducted unethical medical experiments on, and murdered tens of thousands of black people in concentration camps in a part of Southwest Africa now known as Namibia.

The despicable cruelty and depravity of these acts are difficult to fathom and recount, without becoming emotional, but it is important for the world to know of yet another time in history were black bodies were subject to the most inhumane forms of violence by white supremacy in all its unabated and despicable cruelty.

Germany’s Black Holocaust or The Forgotten Holocaust as it is sometimes also referred to occurred during the colonial era. In the “Scramble for Africa” cash-strapped European countries like Britain, Belgium, France, Portugal, and Germany divided up the African continent to exploit its people and its natural resources. During the Berlin Conference in 1884, in a matter of days, they carved out the African continent to their liking — swapping pieces of land among each other like in a morally obscene game of monopoly.

To this day, the artificial borders that they delineated with no regard or respect for human life, as well as the interests and centuries-old alliances of the people that inhabited the land, have caused countless civil wars, disputes, poverty, and suffering across the continent. These colonial powers went on to run vicious, oppressive, and exploitative regimes in these colonies with often the sole objectives of exploiting and even exterminating the tribes to which the land belonged.

With the move from an agrarian to an industrialized economy and the massive population influx from rural to urban areas that ensued, Germany's cities experienced significant overcrowding in the late 19th century. The vast lands and natural resources of Africa were seen as an attractive solution to that problem and as a result, Germany colonized significant portions of the continent including Cameroun, Togo, German East Africa, and Southwest Africa. When they arrived in Southwest Africa, not surprisingly, they found the land to already be inhabited by the Nama and Herero tribes. Motivated by profit, greed, and imperialism, they set off to exploit the land and its precious gold deposits and use the tribes for human labor.

When the Nama and Herero rebelled, the German occupiers decided to exterminate them. They hunted them down, killed them, and drove the survivors deep into the Khalari desert, where they poisoned their water sources. Those that weren’t killed were taken to concentration labor camps where they died of disease and exhaustion. Many were subject to sexual exploitation, and medical experimentation. In some cases, the skulls of the indigenous people were sent to Germany for racial experiments to prove the superiority of white Europeans. Needless to say, this was never proven. Up to 80% of the indigenous populations died during the genocide and the death toll ran in the tens of thousands.

Germany only recently — in 2018 — recognized that this genocide took place, and in May 2021 agreed to pay $1.34 billion in reparations to Namibia for the horrendous acts committed. Activists have said that this is nowhere near enough to compensate the indigenous people for the suffering and loss of life of their ancestors. And they are right, this is nowhere near sufficient and is almost insulting when you consider Germany's $3.8 trillion GDP in 2019.

The funding promised will be disbursed over a 30 year period and will go toward projects to fund infrastructure, healthcare, and training programs for the impacted communities. Germany’s Foreign Minister, Heiko Maas, asked Namibia and the victims’ descendants for forgiveness. “We will now officially refer to these events as what they are from today’s perspective: genocide”, he said. A spokesman for the Namibian government said that Germany’s recognition was “a first step in the right direction”.

For years, the German government tried to deny that this genocide ever took place. Backed by strong government and international advocacy groups, the communities in Namibia kept fighting for Germany to recognize and be held accountable for the horrific role that they played in exterminating a lot of the Nama and Herero people. The Germans could not hide the atrocities committed — there was massive evidence, including the bodies of victims strewn all over the Kalahari desert for years and the skulls of the Nama and Herero people in German museums. In fact, Germany only returned those skulls to Nambia in 2018.

What one realizes is that the Germans modeled the Jewish Holocaust on the genocide they carried out in Southwest Africa. They built concentration camps, conducted inhumane medical experiments, and aimed to exterminate an entire group of people. There are eerie similarities between what they did to the Nama and Herero in Namibia in the late 19th to early 20th centuries and what they did to the Jews in Germany during World War II. It’s shocking to note that they already had the blueprint and had done this before. What they did in Germany was planned and rehearsed — there is no way, anyone can deny that this genocide in Namibia or the genocide in Germany ever happened. The facts and the evidence are clear.

As I write this, there are many other genocides that are happening around the world. People are being killed because they belong to this ethnic group or to another, to this religious group, or another, because they have this sexual preference or another. It’s a sad state of affairs and even sadder to note that some people don’t want to hear about this because it’s too much “bad news” for them to manage or because they believe it is fake news.

But as human beings, we need to do better. We cannot stand by while people are getting slaughtered for who they are and for what they believe. We cannot just continue to sit back and do nothing. As the far-right movements gain more and more of a stronghold in Europe and the US, there seems to be a tendency to undermine multilateralism and the goals of the United Nations to strive for world peace — or at least something close. We need to wake up and do something to stop the genocides that are happening today. As human beings, the day we no longer care is the day we begin to lose our humanity. And what good will the world be without our humanity?

Thank you for reading my perspective