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HOLOCAUST IN AFRICA
In his interesting reflection on the Armenian Holocaust (1 December),
Robert Fisk notes the involvement of members of the Kaiser's army who
later turned up in Hitler's Wehrmacht "helping to organise the mass
killing of Jews", thus illustrating an instructive German involvement
in the two holocausts.
However, he overlooks the first holocaust of the 20th century -
which was not in Armenia but German South West Africa (now Namibia),
where the indigenous Herero people were systematically rounded up
into concentration camps and massacred to make way for the Kaiser's
"place in the sun". The Reichskommissar in charge of creating this
German Lebensraum (living space) was Heinrich Goering, whose son,
Hermann, would become Hitler's Reichsmarschall.
Nor was it a coincidence that many Nazi functionaries who learnt
their trade in the German colonies would - in the words of Viktor
Bottcher, Governor of Posen in 1939 (and a former civil servant in
the German Cameroon) - go on "to perform in the east of the Reich
the constructive work they had once carried out in Africa".
Thus the holocausts of the 20th century reveal a sinister link in
the mentality of colonial contempt for supposedly "inferior" people.
Dominic Kirkham
Manchester
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/letters/letters-pep-talks-from-soldiers-wont-rescue-education-9911252.html
In his interesting reflection on the Armenian Holocaust (1 December),
Robert Fisk notes the involvement of members of the Kaiser's army who
later turned up in Hitler's Wehrmacht "helping to organise the mass
killing of Jews", thus illustrating an instructive German involvement
in the two holocausts.
However, he overlooks the first holocaust of the 20th century -
which was not in Armenia but German South West Africa (now Namibia),
where the indigenous Herero people were systematically rounded up
into concentration camps and massacred to make way for the Kaiser's
"place in the sun". The Reichskommissar in charge of creating this
German Lebensraum (living space) was Heinrich Goering, whose son,
Hermann, would become Hitler's Reichsmarschall.
Nor was it a coincidence that many Nazi functionaries who learnt
their trade in the German colonies would - in the words of Viktor
Bottcher, Governor of Posen in 1939 (and a former civil servant in
the German Cameroon) - go on "to perform in the east of the Reich
the constructive work they had once carried out in Africa".
Thus the holocausts of the 20th century reveal a sinister link in
the mentality of colonial contempt for supposedly "inferior" people.
Dominic Kirkham
Manchester
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/letters/letters-pep-talks-from-soldiers-wont-rescue-education-9911252.html