Europe in the Era of Two World Wars

[Dave Monroe]

On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 3:14 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

> Europe in the Era of Two World Wars:
> From Militarism and Genocide to Civil Society, 1900-1950
> Volker R. Berghahn
>
> http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8042.html

In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, first published in 1951,
Hannah Arendt offered an acute analysis of European colonialism and
the racist-exterminationist forces behind it. Referring to Selwyn
Jones's estimate, she wrote that some twelve million people perished
in Leopold's Congo between 1890 and 1911.24 More recently Adam
Hochschild arrived at the figure of ten million dead during the period
1890-1920. Having closely studied the history of the Belgian Congo but
also that of other parts of Africa, he concluded that "if you were to
ask most Americans or Europeans what were the great totalitarian
systems" of the twentieth century, "almost all would be likely to say:
Communism and Fascism." However, there was, he continued, a third
totalitarian system--"European colonialism--the latter imposed in its
deadliest form in Africa. Each of the three systems asserted the right
to control its subjects' lives; each was buttressed by an elaborate
ideology; each perverted language in an Orwellian way; and each caused
tens of millions of deaths."25

Writing in 1968, Helmut Bley similarly highlighted these elements of
European colonialism in his study of German South-West Africa: "The
balance of power in Africa opened the way for a dogmatizing
[Verabsolutierung] of the ideas and methods of modern control." This,
he added, led to a situation "in which the borderline with the
totalitarian sphere had been transgressed" in South-West Africa. The
colony "reached a stage in which all life chances of the Africans were
subordinated to the will to rule and to the security interests" of the
Europeans. Underlying these considerations was "the idea that the
struggle would be conducted without the possibility of peace."
Consequently, "the Germans set their system of domination in motion on
the premise that the position as masters could not be justified and
that giving a minimum of social and economic leeway would trigger a
process of emancipation among the Africans." This is why they deployed
"the socio-economic and socio-psychological insights of the time
deliberately as instruments of domination." In this process, their
point of orientation was rather more "the general notions of social
conflict that they had adopted from Europe than a specific colonialist
idea of racial inequality."26

Unlike in the Congo, violence escalated slowly in South-West Africa
until it culminated in a genocidal war against the indigenous
populations that was quite cold-bloodedly planned. In 1892 there had
been a campaign against the Nama people. Thereafter, though, Theodor
Leutwein, the governor and representative of the kaiser, tried hard to
create a well-ordered system of governance in the colony in which the
indigenous people would have a firm place, even if it was not one of
equality. Unfortunately his efforts were undermined time and again by
the demands of the white settlers from Germany. Their notions of legal
titles to their properties clashed with the traditions of the
semi-nomadic Herero who, by virtue of their own ancient traditions,
had used the territory for the grazing of their large and roaming
cattle herds. Wolfgang Eckart has described the situation as follows:
"Reckless expropriations of land and the ruthless exploitation of the
indigenous population through fraudulent usury had by the end of 1903
. . . created a state of affairs in which it was merely a question of
time when the Herero would rise who had been pushed from their own
land and soil and had been driven into economic dependency."27

When this point had finally been reached in 1904, the struggle of the
Herero against the troops that Berlin dispatched ended in a
catastrophe in which the victims were not merely the armed Herero
warriors but also women, children, and the elderly. The Nama, whose
fight in the south was more like a guerilla war, lost 35-50 percent of
their people between 1892 and 1911; the figure for the Herero rose to
almost 80 percent. Recent research has modified the older argument
that the Germans brutally drove the Herero into the Omaheke Desert
then hermetically sealed off the region and left entire families to
die in the food- and waterless desert. Rather what seems to have
happened is that some who fled eastward before the advancing German
troops hoped to traverse the desert to Bechuanaland on paths that were
known to them. But since there were so many of them, the relatively
few watering holes on their way became overused and depleted,
delivering thousands to their death. Others were slaughtered on the
spot.

Those who fled westward and finally surrendered had their belongings
and cattle confiscated before they were put into camps in which the
death rate was around 45 percent. This meant that of some 15,000
captured Herero and 2,000 Nama a mere 7,700 survived.28 There are no
reliable figures on total losses, not least because the estimates of
the size of the Herero population before the war vacillated between
35,000 and 100,000. German official statistics for 1911 give the total
number of registered Herero as 15,000. If we merely use the lowest
prewar estimates, this would mean that "more than a third of the
Herero were killed or died as a result of the war."29 The actual
losses were probably much higher. This is also true of the Nama.

The behavior of the Germans raises two points that are relevant for
the basic approach to this study in subsequent chapters and to the
theme of violence. There is first of all the direct killing by the
troops. Herero men, armed or unarmed, who fell into their hands were
murdered without further ado. What differed from nineteenth-century
conventional European warfare was that women and children were also
summarily shot, often after abuse and torture. Those responsible for
such actions appreciated that fundamental human norms were being
violated and therefore tried to justify their actions. A white farmer
who had shot a woman because she had stolen one of his sheep was asked
by a judge why he felt it necessary to use lethal force. He replied:
"Should we simply subject ourselves to theft?" His defense attorney
then used the term "vermin" that, however ominous as a harbinger of
the racism that was to come, was not unusual for this time and, as we
have seen, related to the proliferating biological perceptions of
human society. Planted in the mind of an ordinary white settler of
European background, it was used to justify exploitation and murder.30

At the height of the campaign against the Herero other outrageous but
typical rumors began to circulate about native women who cruelly
mutilated white captives and dead soldiers. These rumors in turn were
used to justify German atrocities. A German military doctor has left a
description of scenes that were widespread during this war: "Bloodily
glittering bayonets in their hands, blood-splattered uniforms: around
them piles of culled enemies, wailing women, screaming children, and
bleating cattle."31 The torturing of the survivors then continued in
the camps. Joachim Zeller has recently published an essay on the
Swakopmund Camp with horrific photos.32 The title of his article
("Hundreds were driven to their deaths like cattle and [then] buried
like cattle") is taken from a report by a missionary. The report added
that it was hardly possible to exaggerate the "crudity" and the
"brutal behavior as masters [Herrentum]" that its author had
witnessed.

During the most murderous period the daily death toll at Swakopmund
from undernourishment and hard slave labor was around thirty. Whoever
survived these conditions continued to be without legal protection and
was subjected to whipping. The rape of women was also common. As
Zeller demonstrates by reference to the cynical descriptions at the
bottom of his photos, camp supervisors had a "disdain for human beings
that was motivated by racism." This disdain can also be seen in the
way the skulls of fallen or murdered Hereros were treated. Herero
women were forced to clean the skulls of skin with bits of broken
glass. They were then collected for racist anatomical research and
sent to institutes in Germany.

That something horrendous had happened in German South-West Africa in
1904 during the encounter between the Europeans and the indigenous
populations can also be gauged from the ambivalent reports of some of
the soldiers involved in the campaign. Here we find, next to
descriptions of massacres, doubts about the "heroic" exploits of the
colonial troops. With respect and even admiration they write about the
tall and slender figures of the Herero warriors who did not fit the
stereotypes of inferior "negroes" they had picked up back home.
Physicians seem to have felt pangs of conscience as well. Wavering
between pity and a heart of stone, one of them wrote: "They are a
genuine calamity, those amputated blacks. They haven't learned
anything, they cannot work, and if, after their wounds have healed,
they are discharged into the street, they just starve to death.
Consequently they stay here and are fed with the others. Soon the
state will even have to build homes for cripples."33

However, in order to grasp what happened in Africa under European
colonial rule, we must also deal, apart from the mentalities and
attitudes of the perpetrators, with those of their superiors and
commanding officers. To begin with, there is Leutwein's dilemma that
reflects the failure of his attempt to establish order and stability
between 1894 and the outbreak of the war ten years later and that
explains why he was replaced by Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha.
"A persistent colonial policy," he wrote, "no doubt requires the
killing of all prisoners capable of bearing arms." He himself would
not resort to such methods. Nor, however, would he reprimand the
person who would do so. After all, "colonial policy is basically an
inhuman matter. And ultimately it can only lead to a deterioration of
the rights of the indigenous population in favor of those who forced
their way in. Whoever does not agree with this, must be an opponent of
colonial policy in general--a position that is at least logical." At
the same time, Leutwein continued, "it is not right, on the one hand,
to deprive the natives of their land on the basis of questionable
agreements and for this purpose to gamble with the life and health of
fellow-citizens on the ground and, on the other, to praise [the
virtues of] humanity in the Reichstag, such as some Reichstag deputies
have done."34

Trotha, Leutwein's successor, was not hampered by such inhibitions.
After his victory over the Herero in October 1904, he published a
proclamation that bluntly articulated European inhumanity: "The Herero
are no longer German subjects. They have been murdering, thieving;
[they] have cut off the ears, noses, and other body parts and now no
longer want to fight because of cowardice." Accordingly, "every Herero
whether he is caught with or without a rifle, with or without cattle,"
was to be shot. He continued, "I shall no longer accommodate women and
children, drive them back to their own people or give orders that they
be shot at . . . [Signed:] The great general of the powerful."35

These words, it must be admitted, were a bit too much for Germany's
Reich chancellor Bernhard von Bülow, who had himself coined a few
aggressive slogans when it came to selling German expansionist
Weltpolitik. But Bülow's qualms did not prevent Trotha from issuing
another order to his troops in which he promised his men a bonus for
each Herero killed. Only when it came to women, he added, should they
aim above the target's head. Since his order presumably meant that "no
more male prisoners would be taken," his troops' violent practices
were not to turn into "atrocities against women and children." In
other words, he was not prepared to erase the line between combatants
and civilians completely. However, as we have seen, in reality all
Hereros were treated as outlaws to be liquidated. It did not make much
difference that Bülow, sitting in Berlin, began to worry about the
public criticism that Trotha's radicalism might unleash back home.
Consequently, he asked the kaiser as supreme commander of all German
troops to countermand Trotha's orders because they "contradicted all
Christian and humanitarian principles."

The tension between those who wanted to uphold some standards of
humanity and those who were prepared to abandon them--a tension, as we
shall see, that began to weaken in the second half of World War I and
had disappeared by the time of World War II--also emerges when we
juxtapose Bülow's attitudes with those of Alfred von Schlieffen, chief
of the General Staff. He, the father of the battle of annihilation
(discussed below), was much more a kindred spirit of Trotha when he
wrote that the commander of South-West Africa needed to be supported
if he "wants to destroy the entire [Herero] nation or drive it out of
the territory. After what has happened, it will be very difficult for
the blacks to live together with the whites, if the former are not to
be kept permanently in a state of forced labor, i.e., in a kind of
slavery." Consequently, "the race war that has broken out can only be
concluded with the annihilation of one party."36 A retrospective
report, produced by the General Staff two years later, came to the
conclusion, "The waterless Omaheke [Desert] was to complete what
German arms had begun: the annihilation of the Herero people."

Such statements raise the question as to whether the war in South-West
Africa was genocidal not merely in its practice at the front but also
in intent when we consider the orders the troops received. Many
historians have answered this question in the affirmative; others have
rejected this notion. Gesine Krüger has recently tried to distance the
atrocities in the colonies before 1914 somewhat from the Nazi "Final
Solution of the Jewish Question" in World War II. However, by
referring to the definitions of genocide that Zygmunt Bauman and other
social scientists developed, she, too, concludes that what happened in
German South-West Africa was genocide. Tilman Dedering has compared
the behavior of the colonial troops to that of the Wehrmacht in
eastern Europe during World War II.37

Two aspects must be added to these recent verdicts by historians in
light of the criticism that the war against the Herero encountered in
the Reichstag at the time. Both of them point to the violent
experience Europe underwent in the future. The liberal economist
Moritz Bonn wrote in 1909--and hence long before he had to flee from
Hitler's dictatorship--"As long as there are still people who deem
such policies as necessitated by Nature, the danger will persist that
they may also be used in other places. If the mistakes of Trotha's
colonial policy can be surrounded with a theoretical halo, nothing
will protect us from it being repeated."38 Bonn probably did not have
the faintest notion then that Europe itself might one day be one of
those "other places." Given that violence no longer had any
boundaries, Bley pointed to the double boomerang effect of colonialism
in and after World War I. In his view, the Germans approached
South-West Africa initially with attitudes that "were rooted in the
social unrest of contemporary Europe." Later the "methods of treating
human beings" practiced in the colonies ricocheted back "into the
motherland."39

Bley's thoughtful though depressing argument, derived form his study
of colonialism, leads us back to Europe. Violence in the colonies,
whether British, Belgian, German, French, or Italian, had assumed
forms before 1914 that "consumed" not just combatants but also
civilians. The next question to be investigated is what kinds of
images of warfare Europeans developed concerning their own part of the
world before total war hit them with real force after 1914....

> http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8042.html
> http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8042.pdf