The German army's campaigns against the Herero and Nama peoples between 1904 and 1907 were the result of the sum of several dynamics that defined their development: Western military culture, the emergence of Total War, German military doctrine, and biological racism linked to the cultural revolution that took place in Europe in the last decades of the 19th century. However, the defining factor in its development was the international position of the German Empire at the beginning of the 20th century. The result was not only the defeat of two indigenous peoples, but also the first genocide of the 20th century. However, this genocide was not a planned action but the result of the German military's inability to defeat the indigenous warriors. After the victory of the Kaiser's soldiers, the imperial general staff was unable to draw any lessons from this colonial war, despite the limitations of the concept of the decisive battle, the cornerstone of its military doctrine.
TopIntroduction
The German military campaigns against the Herero and Nama peoples between 1904 and 1907 constituted not only the first genocide of the twentieth century, but also a manifestation of a set of dynamics –Western military culture, Total War, German military doctrine and racism– that had developed over the previous decades. The key element, however, was the system of international relations that had developed between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Muñoz Bolaños, 2021: 77). Based on this idea, we set out the following objectives to be developed:
Explain the characteristics of the dynamics that defined these campaigns: Western military culture, Total War, German military doctrine and biological racism
Put this campaign in its international context
Analyse the evolution of operations against the Hereros and Nama not only in terms of the military actions that defined them, but also in terms of contemporary international events, especially the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905)
Describe its limited influence on German military doctrine
TopBackground
The 1960s saw two very important processes in the field of German historiography. The Marxist historian of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Horst Drechsler (1966), published a study on the campaign against the Herero and Nama in which he developed the theory of genocide and tried to link this “criminal” process to the Federal Republic of Germany (1966: 158). At the same time, two historians of the same GFR school, Fritz Fischer (1967) and Hans-Ulrich Wehler (1985), proposed the theory of the Deutsche Sonderweg (German special road), according to which the modernisation process in Germany was partial, as economic transformations were not accompanied by social changes, which resulted in an undemocratic aristocratic elite provoking two world wars with the sole aim of maintaining its dominant position. Thus, for both historians, there was continuity between Imperial Germany (1871-1918) and Nazi Germany (1933-1945). The military campaign against the Hereros and the Nama in German South West Africa (1904-1907) would be an example of this relationship and, consequently, a forerunner of the holocaust unleashed during the Second World War (1939-1945). The result of this approach was the thesis that a direct path from Windhoek (capital of German South West Africa) to Auschwitz can be established (Madley, 2005; Steinmetz, 2005; Erichsen and Olusoga, 2010). This thesis was also defended by the American historian Isabel Hull (2005), albeit on the basis of the existence of an extremely violent German military culture, developed during the imperial period, which would be the link between the genocidal dynamics that took place before 1914, during the First World War (Belgium) and after 1918. However, Helmuth Bley (1968), who studied this campaign in detail and considered the Herero and Nama to have been victims of genocide, questioned this approach, arguing that the events that took place in South West Africa and the genocidal dynamics that were triggered during the Second World War belonged to different historical moments. His position was defended by a broad group of historians: Birthe Kundruss (2003), Wolfgang Benz (2007), Robert Gerwath and Stephan Malonowski (2007), Jürgen Zimmerer (2011), Richard Evans (2015) and Susanne Kuss (2017). Finally, Matthias Häussler (2021: 14-19), who also rejected the idea of continuity, developed the theory of colonialism as an open system to explain what happened in German South West Africa.