By 1908, as David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen show in this horrifying and graphically told account, only 16,000 Hereros and 10,000 Namas were left alive. And it is tempting to see the whole ghastly saga in the terms that these authors propose – as another Aryan seizure of Lebensraum resulting in the final solution to the Namibian problem. As their title and subtitle indicate, they emphasise the continuity between the kaiser and Hitler and suggest that nazism stemmed from colonial roots of evil, themselves long forgotten.
This is highly dubious. In the first place it is nonsense to say that the genocide in south-west Africa is forgotten. Admittedly, it could be better known. Germans did their best to suppress the evidence and to portray their homicidal activities as a triumph of civilisation, and British imperialists, with their own guilt to hide, were sometimes complicit in the obfuscation. But particularly since Horst Drechsler's pioneering study, Let Us Die Fighting (1966), on which the present book draws heavily, academic and popular interest in the subject has been strong.
Secondly, it is misleading to represent the Führer as the kaiser's heir. National Socialism had no time for monarchy and its trappings. To be sure Wilhelm was antisemitic: he once advocated employing gas in a pogrom. But His Impulsive Majesty was as erratic in this as in everything else. Damned by Hitler as an "incorrigible fool", he had rich Jewish friends, disliked nazism and said that Kristallnacht made him ashamed to be German. The kaiser, who died in 1941, would hardly have endorsed Hitler's Holocaust. And since this was an event unique in scale and method, the term should probably not be applied to the genocide in Africa.
Finally, Hitler's drive to secure living-space from Slav untermenschen owed little or nothing to Germany's imperial endeavours in Africa. Indeed, as the authors briefly concede, he regarded them as an outdated diversion from the Third Reich's destiny on the steppes. None of the kaiser's colonies would compare with his eastern empire, he boasted, and the only bit of the "dark continent" he wanted back was the Cameroons. Hitler's malign philosophy was fertilised by much dung, but it did not grow out of African soil.
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