Herero

[Otto]

German news say tonight that the Herero are going to court in Washington
against the Deutsche Bank and the German Government. Can't find anything on
NYT, CNN or US-Yahoo on this.

Otto

http://de.biz.yahoo.com/010906/71/1xiwp.html


>    The historical facts are not disputed. Lieut. Gen. Lothar von Trotha,
>notorious for his butchery in German East Africa, was dispatched with
>10,000 volunteers and a battle plan.
>    Von Trotha pushed the Herero guerrillas and their families north to
>Waterberg and then attacked from three sides, leaving one exit: the Omaheke
>Desert. When the Herero fled into it, he poisoned the water holes, erected
>guard posts along a 150-mile line and bayoneted everyone who crawled out.
>    He then issued the Vernichtungsbefehl, or extermination order: "Within
>the German borders, every Herero, whether armed or unarmed, with or without
>cattle, will be shot. I shall not accept any more women or children. I
>shall drive them back to their people -- otherwise I shall order shots to
>be fired at them."
>    The remaining Herero were rounded up and sent to labor camps, where
>they starved or died of overwork, typhus and smallpox.
>    By 1907 the order had been denounced and von Trotha had been recalled
>-- but the rebellion had been crushed. Before the war there were 80,000
>Herero. In the 1911 census, 15,000 were found.
>    Few people outside southern Africa or Germany have heard of the tribe
>unless they have read Thomas Pynchon's novel "Gravity's Rainbow" or seen
>travel books depicting their unusual clothes.
>    In Mr. Pynchon's 1973 novel, a psychedelic take on World War II during
>the rain of German rockets on London, a fictional Herero battalion called
>the Schwarzkommando runs rocket batteries in the occupied Netherlands.
>Historians say they are a figment of Mr. Pynchon's imagination. The tiny
>numbers of black Germans, descendants of French African soldiers occupying
>the Rhineland after World War I, were sterilized by the Third Reich, not
>drafted.

http://www.ukans.edu/~kansite/wwi-l/msg00156.html