Ep. 25- The Holocaust and the German Genocide in Namibia with Jürgen Zimmerer

Was the Holocaust a unique event or did it have its roots in earlier historical events?  How do we put earlier colonial genocides in context and conversation with the Holocaust?  On this episode, we talk about the connections between the German genocide of the Herero and Nama in Namibia and its occupation of eastern Europe.

 On this episode I talked with Jürgen Zimmerer about this topic.  We also looked at the role that the colonial genocides play in German popular memory as well as the fierce current debate over German official apologies and reparations.

 
Jürgen Zimmerer is a Professor of History at the University of Hamburg.

Zimmerer, Jürgen. From Windhoek to Auschwitz?: Reflections on the colonial-Nationalsocialist nexus (2023)

 Zimmerer, Jürgen. German Rule, African Subjects: State Aspirations and the Reality of Power in Colonial Namibia (2022)

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:00.536)
Hello everybody. Welcome to the Holocaust history podcast. I'm your host, Whiteman Bourne. And today I'm really excited to have Jürgen Zimmerer, who is a scholar of the Holocaust and other genocides as well, on to talk about an important topic, which is thinking about the Holocaust, but in the context of other genocides and in particular, the German genocide in what is now Namibia, but also larger issues of

the ways in which the Nazis may have been imperialist and colonialists as well. And what that says about our understanding of those topics and how that fits into sort of other histories and connects the Holocaust to other examples of those kinds of policies throughout history. So Jurgen, welcome to the podcast.

Juergen Zimmerer (00:51.466)
Welcome, thank you.

Waitman Beorn (00:53.016)
Can you tell us a little bit about where you're coming from, how you got interested in this topic?

Juergen Zimmerer (00:58.634)
Yes, I'm German. I was studying in the south of Germany and then I won an exchange program to the University of Oxford and I had to choose a topic for my master's thesis at Oxford. And I went to Terry Ranger, very famous historian of Africa. You might know the book by Hobbs, Berman and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition.

And he pointed me actually to German colonial history. And I'd look at the Herrera Unama, there is something there, I don't speak German, I can't research it. Why don't you do it? That was in 1990, a long way back. And I had learned at school German colonialism was great. It was a sort of a humanitarian boy scout sort of thing. And the bad colonizers there were the British and the French.

and all them, the Germans were the great ones. So I went to study this and realized that there was this colonial violence, incredible colonial violence, which I then called the first genocide of the 20th century, and that I was taught a lie. So after Oxford, I went on to do a PhD. I researched on German colonialism on the ground. So it was like saying,

We have to also look at the colonizers' perspective to see what aims they had and what techniques they developed and also this genocide. We were doing it in Freiburg at the time. We are now in the mid -1990s with a lot of things going on in Holocaust studies. New research is coming out saying we have to understand the connection between the war and the Holocaust, etc.

and we had the Wehrmachtsausstellung in Germany. There were a lot of things going on to see who were the perpetrators, how many of them. And I then realized that what Christian Gerlach, others told about the German occupation of Eastern Europe resonated with what I knew from German colonial rule in German South West Africa in Namibia. And so I then, after the PhD,

Juergen Zimmerer (03:20.458)
I wrote a few articles, colonialism and the Holocaust, or the birth of the Austria, of the Ostland, out of the spirit of colonialism, where I draw these lines, then became a book from Wintour to Auschwitz, a collection of essays, basically, which has now been translated into English, 20 years later, because there was then a debate...

the debate unfolding in Germany. We are now talking about 2004, 2005, and I got more and more drawn into it and said there is a connection, there is an imperial mentality, there is maybe a genocidal mentality connecting the colonization of the German colonization of Southern Africa and then later of Eastern Europe.

Waitman Beorn (04:14.744)
And that's a great introduction. And before we get to sort of some of those connections, you know, maybe it's helpful just to give our listeners kind of a little bit of background in terms of what's going on. What are the sort of historical facts of the German colonial projects in Africa, particularly German Southwest Africa in what is now Namibia?

Juergen Zimmerer (04:37.29)
It's good that we talk this year because it's actually 140 years that the German colonial empire was founded. I mean, to give you a Germany was a colonial latecomer for the simple fact that there was no German state, no unified German state until 1871 when Bismarck...

for forged the German Empire, the Second German Empire, the Kaiserreich. And then, which as you know, was quite short -lived. So it didn't survive World War I. So it was 1871 to 1918. And in 1984, Bismarck gave in to popular demands.

to create a German colonial empire. That was mainly for economic reasons, for political reasons and for symbolic reasons because it unified Germans, the elites wanted to be at par with the British. And that, well, what is the sign for being a real world power? It's to have colonies like France, like Britain, et cetera. So in 1884,

Four colonies in Africa were founded, Togo, Cameroon, German South West Africa, today's Namibia and German East Africa, today's Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi and then a couple of colonies in Asia. That was in 1884 and in German South West Africa which was the only German settler colony.

important to this story, was also short -lived. From 1884 to 1915, because in 1915, during World War I, the British Empire, South African army, invaded and the fighting was over after a couple of weeks. And the German Empire was a thing of the past, at least the German Empire in Africa. Now, because Namibia,

Juergen Zimmerer (07:01.898)
is quite a... it's a large country, it's roughly double the size of Germany now and it has around, the US figure say, three million inhabitants today. This is, I mean, this is not even Berlin, citizen -wide. And that shows that this is a difficult, it's a very dry country.

It's not a lot of agriculture, not easy to farm, etc. So it was more a left over piece. The British were not interested in the territory because they had South Africa. There was no need for them. And the Portuguese were not interested because they had Angola to name the two neighboring colonies. And the Germans now developed the idea that they could...

prove there that they were actually the best colonizers of the world. And they could do that by drawing up a colony, a settler colony, a white German colony from scratch. Ignore completely all indigenous structures and rebuild almost a utopian colonial estate.

but utopian in a negative sense. They called it a racial racist utopia. And that was saying, okay, we get invite Germans who will be the master race and we will then completely restructure the territory. Now, all of you, our audience, are you familiar with the plans, the Nazi plans of Eastern Europe will immediately see,

ignoring all indigenous structures, building up from scratch, ignoring completely the rights of the citizens, that rings a bell. And that's exactly what happened. It was then forced along because in 1904, 20 years after the German colonization started, the Herrero, which were the largest group,

Juergen Zimmerer (09:21.514)
In Namibia there were also O 'Wambo in the north, but they were outside of German administration. The Herero and then the Nama took up arms against Germany. Again, 120 years. It was 11th of January 1904. They were quite successful because there were not many German soldiers in the country.

But for reasons still unknown, they stopped short of driving the Germans literally into the sea. They stopped short. And then German reinforcement was sent. And they sort of sent around probably 20 ,000 German soldiers, which was a huge number for the time, for Germany at least. And they started to arrive. And then the very...

The infamous German general, Lothar von Drotha, took command because he was elected by the Kaiser himself for the very reason that he was the most experienced German colonial officer. He was in German East Africa. Before that, he was then in China during the so -called Boxer Rebellion, and he was simply the most brutal officer they could find. And he was given a carte blanche to suppress.

revolt as it was called by any means necessary and so he did and in August 1904 the Battle of Waterberg was fought and then in 19 on after that the surviving Harero some roughly 50, 60, 70 ,000 people women and children mainly men were driven into the

the semi -desert of the Oma Heke, which is in the border between Namibia and today's Botswana. And then on the 2nd of October 1904, the boundary to the desert was sealed off by the German army. And a very infamous genocide order was issued by von Drota saying that we will shoot whoever tries to leave the desert.

Juergen Zimmerer (11:45.674)
And so most of the Herero perished in the desert in the following months. Then the Nama in the south rose. The German army waged a war of annihilation against them, put them, the survivors, then in concentration camps where many were left to die. That's the war which we call now the first genocide of the 20th century.

After this war, or during the war, laws were passed which were aimed at controlling completely every movement of every Herero Namer. They had to wear tokens, visible tokens, passmarken in Germany with numbers. They were put with their numbers in books if they wanted to leave.

their village, they had to get a passport from a German. So it's a very rigid attempt at total control and total reordering now of the land and the people. And I think that is also a connection to later Nazi plans.

Waitman Beorn (13:11.544)
And one of the things that I always found interesting, you know, because I used to teach whenever I taught comparative genocide, I taught, you know, the Herrera and the Nama as one of the examples. And it sort of, as I understand it, to a certain extent, it ends because there is some level of outcry by moderate Germans. Right. And so they there is some form of governmental pushback. Is that is that accurate? That sort of.

Juergen Zimmerer (13:40.234)
Well, yeah, I think it's too rose -coloured. I mean, it's true that when Trotter gave the order to seal off the desert, that he had to rescind this order in December. And from December onwards, they again took prisoners and then put them in concentration camps. And this has been also a standard argument that there's not a genocide.

Waitman Beorn (13:41.304)
Or is that two sort of rose colored glasses?

Juergen Zimmerer (14:10.058)
and that it was Lothar von Drothar transgressing the boundaries of what he was allowed to do and that he was stopped. But imagine people being in August 11th at the Warteberg, there's a battle, they escape. The German army pushes the women and children and the elderly towards the desert. The German army had after three days to stop.

They're chasing because the German soldiers were too exhausted. They had to stop, then they started again. Now imagine they are fleeing there. In October, they are reaching the desert. They are entering the desert. They knew about water holes there, but they were not enough. The German army pushing them deeper and deeper into the desert. Now in December, that's five months later, they said, okay,

We are now sort of allowing out. There were not a lot of people alive then, because they were five months into the war. So I think this is actually an apologetic argument by German historians. It is true though that some people said, no, we don't want this. But they most of, for example,

the Social Democratic Party in the Reichstag, in the German parliament, they criticized the extinction of the Herero. But they were not critical of colonialism as such. And they were quite happy then with this new state and the new regime which they wanted to establish. So they were against the war, but they were not against, I would say, enslavement.

and not formal enslavement, it's not chattel slavery. There's a different form of administrative racism, which would then, that was the idea, create a society in which all races, quote unquote, have their space and where the indigenous people would serve.

Juergen Zimmerer (16:34.538)
German master race. And I think most of the Germans who knew about it were happy with that.

Waitman Beorn (16:43.608)
Yeah, I mean, and it also sort of bears mentioning, you know, that not that it matters whether indigenous peoples are sort of more advanced technologically or whatever. But, you know, the rare were quite literate, a lot of them, and many of them are Christian. And, you know, Samuel Mahera, right, the leader knows about the Kaiser. And, you know, I mean, these are not, you know, these are not what what the stereotype, the racist stereotype of sort of indigenous peoples are anyway. But yet.

Nazis are Nazis, the Germans are still, you know, applying this racial sort of categorization to them.

Juergen Zimmerer (17:20.074)
Well, it's very interesting because it's good that you mentioned it because the most fascinating figure in this game, or not game, in this picture is Henry Goodboy. Henry Goodboy is some 80 years old, a Nama leader. And before the genocide, when the colonization started, he exchanged letters with the German governor. And he was very proud. He knew exactly about the structures. He was warning.

his fellow chiefs against entering into alliances with the Germans as some did, some in Moherian did, which, because the interesting question is how could, it's all over, in all European colonies, how could a relative small number of people, intruders, establish themselves against a vast majority of indigenous

people and indigenous fighters. And it's this sort of collaboration for which Samuel Maharero unfortunately stands before he then took up arms and resisted. But Hendrik Wittboij refused to sign a treaty and then was forced by a massacre already.

in the late 19th century. But then he exchanged letters with the governor and they say, look, you are only the representative of the German Kaiser. That's what you tell me, you're the representative. But I am, so you're representative of your chief. I am the chief of the Nama. So I am above you. You are only the, and that's very interesting because he shows how it challenges this view we have of the complete.

passive indigenous people without their own agency. They had their agency, they were planning, it's only the brute force of the German military, the technical advances and the willingness to be more brutal, more barbaric than the so -called barbaric people which allowed to establish this...

Juergen Zimmerer (19:46.41)
racist state.

Waitman Beorn (19:48.312)
Yeah, I mean, and I think if I remember correctly as well, you know, that even when the war was going on, you know, while the Germans were basically killing everybody that they came across, even the Herrero, when they captured Germans were not killing them and were, you know, sort of treating them, you know, relatively, relatively well as well. So it's kind of one of these, you know, again, just sort of throwing sort of the stereotypes on their heads.

Juergen Zimmerer (20:12.298)
Yeah, German propaganda had it that the Herrero were killing, it's true, they killed 123 Germans in their initial attack on the farms. And the German propaganda over there were killing innocent women and children. Now we only know from one woman who was killed. So it was 122 men and one woman.

and the men were regarded, the farmers were regarded as warriors, as legitimate opponents. But we have several proof of several occasions where Harero guided accompanied women and children from their farms to the German settlements, though they were not harmed. So it's the whole thing about barbaric, not barbaric.

It's completely turned upside down in this war. The German army, the German settlers were fighting women and children, the Herrera and the Nama did not.

Waitman Beorn (21:23.288)
So what are some of the connections then, both sort of direct and indirect, both sort of in terms of people and policies, but also ideologies between German colonialism, particularly in Southwest Africa, and then later on in Eastern Europe? Because I know one of the historical questions that historians always argue about is sort of how straight is the line and how direct is the connection and these kinds of things. So.

What are some of the connections that you see between what happened in Namibia and then essentially Eastern Europe? Because we can also talk about why Eastern Europe received, I would argue, fundamentally different treatment than Western Europe. But yeah.

Juergen Zimmerer (22:12.842)
Sorry.

Well, I think there are, but people were saying there are direct connections. There was the first German governor was Heinrich Göring, the father of Hermann Göring. There were a few people in German colonies or in the Herero war who then became officers or Freikorps leaders. But I think that is rather...

It's good to know, but that's not the important thing. There is no causal link between both. Because that is also, I think, a distortion of my argument. Was I was there, it's a causal link. No, it's not a cause, because if you ask why Hitler came to power, I mean, there are libraries full of it. And good arguments for it.

So that is, it did not rise to power because of German colonialism. The question is, what plans did the Nazis, and by Nazis I also mean, you know, the elite, the bureaucratic elite, German elite, it's not only Nazis, it's, I think, an argument developed after the war that there are only a handful of Nazis and the rest were just, you know,

ordinary Germans, decent citizens. I mean, what we have is an almost complete handing over of the academic institutions, the planning institutions. They all became involved into this new imperial project in Eastern Europe. And I think that we can see that they attempted...

Juergen Zimmerer (24:07.114)
I said in Namibia it was the controlling of space through the rays and you can see the same in Eastern Europe. And I think there's not a direct link but I said that there is an institutional memory, there is an institutional knowledge developed and the interesting question is, is there a link now from Namibia to let's say

the Soviet Union or Poland? Or are they both drawing on a third source? And is Namibia then the testing ground? Is that the first territory where they really engaged in this? Because the structural similarities are so close, especially to the Generalplan Ost, for example, that, I mean, this is not accidental. It's the same...

Waitman Beorn (24:48.952)
Mm.

Juergen Zimmerer (25:04.81)
military tradition, it's the same bureaucratic mind that within 30 years, 30, 40 years, engages twice in building a racist state, twice in genocide, twice in conquering living space, Lebensraum. And the whole idea of Lebensraum, the whole social Darwinian idea that Germany as it stood after German unification in 1871,

is too small, it's not large enough. That you need settlement space, I think, is evident in both. So I'd rather say we should treat German, or we should understand the war in Eastern Europe. And you were quite right in saying the interesting thing is if you compare the Western theater to the Eastern theater, you have completely different way the German army

in World War II behaved.

Juergen Zimmerer (26:12.138)
like Oradour and all this what happened. I mean, it's still completely different. And I think we should treat the war in the East as a second chapter in the history of German colonial empire. You have one in the South and you have one in the East. And if you know the Volk on a Raum, People without Spaces, very famous book, which...

it became symbolic for the Nazi Eastern expansion. Actually, if you read the book, it's set in South Africa. And so the slogan travels from the South to the East and the aim or the geographical direction migrates to the East. And interestingly, Hitler himself gives in a couple of occasions an explanation for that.

He says Russia is our India. And the good thing is he says is that the Royal Navy cannot intervene. So if you know about Hitler and his self -perception, also as a strategic thinker, the importance of World War I, his experience was...

With the outbreak of World War I, the German overseas colonies were completely useless for the defense of the mainland because the Royal Navy cut all the links. That is, I think, an idea which he then developed and said, okay, we get a blockade.

I'm not sure I can translate it into English. And look, we get an empire that cannot be cut off. The individual parts cannot be cut off from each other. And that makes it, and you have to know that. Or Himmler travels through occupied Eastern Europe and they all say, it's filthy, it's colonial land.

Waitman Beorn (28:20.408)
blockade proof or something. Yeah.

Juergen Zimmerer (28:36.138)
because the racist underpinning, you know, the perception of Eastern Europe and Southern Africa is not all that different. It's land which is inhabited by people who are deemed as being inferior. And the land is not developed as good as it could if proper developers, proper colonizers,

proper administrators, German administrators, were to develop it. And that can all be changed. And then the territory can show its true potential. And for that, Gen. Plan Oster accepts that 60 or 70 million Slavs are driven out of what would be now the western part of Russia and into Siberia, knowing fully well that they will not survive there. So...

If you take Generalplan Ost seriously, you get on a level of victims accepted by the German elite, the bureaucratic, administrative and military elite, that even pays the figure of six million murdered Jews. Sixty million people. I mean, then they lost the war, thanks God. Stalingrad happened.

But it's monstrous.

Waitman Beorn (30:05.688)
And for our listeners, just to kind of give a little more background, this Generalpund Ost is this German plan, this Nazi plan to essentially, first of all, feed the German army off the land that is conquered, then feed the German population off the land that it's conquered, and then whatever food is left over goes to people that the Nazis deem capable of work. And the rest, as Jurgen's pointing out,

are basically condemned to die and or be pushed east of the Ural mountain ranges. And again, as he points out, the numbers are in writing, they say umpteen million or 30 to 40 million are going to be murdered or going to die from starvation. And that's okay. And even though they're not successful, there are examples from across occupied Eastern Europe.

from Poland all the way into the Soviet Union of starvation beginning to take place in places like Kiev and other places. So yeah, this general plan Ost is sort of a very much a plan to sort of ethnically cleanse all of vast quantities of land from Germans, from Slavs and people deemed racially inferior. I just wanted to point that out so that for those people that may not be... Yeah.

Juergen Zimmerer (31:26.442)
Yeah, but if I might just step in, because in the concentration camp on Shark Island in Namibia, they incarcerated 2 ,000 people from the Unama war, including women and children. And then they realized that they are dying there, they are not getting enough food. And then they decided, let them die there. We're not shooting them. There are no... about the connection.

because often you see the argument there are concentration camps like Auschwitz annihilation camps in German South -South Africa. No, there were none. There were no camps where people were actually actively, if I may say so, sorry, were murdered. But they were just left there to die. And if you look what happened when the German army in 1941 advanced into the Soviet Union.

and caught more than two million Soviet soldiers. They just put them in camps, literally on the plain land, they put barbed wire around the territory, put them in and let them starve. And that is the sort of connection, which also, I mean, which actually sets the Holocaust as the murder of the Jews apart.

Because I think that this annihilation camps are different from what happened, for example, with the Slavs. It's a difference between whether you put somebody in a camp, you collect them, put them in a camp and actively murder them by suffocating them with gas, or whether you drive them to Siberia. But new research on the... It's not new research anymore.

on the Holocaust has showed that there are links between the murder of the Jews and the war itself. So if there's a link between the war itself and colonialism, logically there's also a connection between colonialism and the Holocaust itself.

Waitman Beorn (33:41.176)
I mean, one of the things that I've always said, because oftentimes you hear this argument that, the war in Eastern Europe, you know, the war against Soviets was this sort of incredibly barbaric and exceptional form of warfare. And I always say that it's actually the opposite, that the war in Western Europe and to a certain extent, North Africa is the exception to the Nazi way of war, you know, that they're actually, they actually are sort of limiting themselves in their.

and what they're doing, whereas in Eastern Europe, this war of annihilation that you're talking about is precisely the way that the Nazis would prefer to always fight a war, you know, with this sort of zero sum game where they're always, you know, I mean, it's a racially motivated in some ways, right? It's a, it's a, the treatment of both the combatants and the inhabitants is a racial, racially defined thing. And it's, it's barbaric from the start. It's not something that sort of is a result of the back and forth of the war. It's, you know, these

these prisoner camps, for example, that you're talking about, you know, are established from day one, you know, and the, and it's the, the German army is barbaric when it enters the Soviet union, right?

Juergen Zimmerer (34:48.33)
I think it's two types of war. The war in the West is like a traditional war between European powers. War crimes took place, but they tried to limit the effects. I mean, this is, I mean, we have since the late 19th century, this attempt to limit the consequences of war for the combatants. The problem is in the East,

Like in the South, they were not seen as competence, the opponents were not seen as competence worthy of any protection. They were not on the same level. I mean, in theory, German soldiers and the French soldier and the English soldier and an American soldier, unless he was black, white American, they were treated with some degree of decency. I mean, I don't want to belittle all the war crimes that happened.

But the chances to survive as a German or as an American or a British in German custody were a thousand percent higher than as a Soviet soldier. And I think that tells you what you have in the East because it's seen as a colonial war.

all breaks are taken out. There are no limits to any ideas of humanitarian law because they were...

created or how you construct it as indigenous, as an inferior race. It's again something parallel with the Holocaust, where we say both cases, Slavs and Jews, are created by the perpetrator, by the Germans as an inferior race, yet there are differences, because anti -Semitism is different from anti -Slavism.

Juergen Zimmerer (36:59.754)
But the parallels are there. And I think we need to explore now in detail how this is linked.

Waitman Beorn (37:10.584)
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that, you know, that I've noticed a little bit and obviously, you know, I've only touched on this a little bit when I've been researching for certain things. But, you know, it seems like that Hitler, at least some of the things he says and some of his other and some of his subordinates are also inspired by Western imperialism. You know, that there's a quote where Hitler says that, you know, we should look upon the Slavs as redskins, you know.

referring directly to the United States. And there's a quote where he sort of looks admiringly at what the British did to the First Nations in Canada. To what extent are they looking at other settler colonial endeavors as models for what they're doing? And to what extent is this something that they sort of, the Nazis already know how to do because of this, what you've already laid out, this kind of...

internal experience in German colonies, do you think?

Juergen Zimmerer (38:09.642)
I think...

We know that Hitler was a big fan of Karl May. Now, Karl May is a figure, a German author who really needs to be explained because he's, how is this thing, he's world famous in Germany. So everybody knows, knew him in Germany. He wrote this Western stories about this German colonizers at the North American frontier. And he created this Winnie -the -Toe figure.

this native chief who became a blood brother of the German and they had all these adventures. And that is incredibly popular, popular until the 1980s with movies, etc. And he is, I think, till today the German author with the most books sold. Now...

When he wrote the books, he hadn't been to the US. He also wrote books about Africa and about the Ottoman Empire because he was poor and he was in prison and he escaped mentally, so to speak, by imagining this world. But he created an idea of a frontier society. I think which every German knew.

in the first half of the 20th century. And I think that's where Hitler and Himmler and others got ideas from. And the thing is about him, although he created this hero, this Native American hero figure, he still sort of justified the idea of a settler colonial...

Juergen Zimmerer (40:04.266)
taking off the land. And we know that some of the ideas Himmler had about Eastern Europe were a draw from his imaginations about the North American frontier. It's like what I said when Hitler said Russia is our India and like the Brits we will rule this with a handful of people. Now, then people say,

But the reality in North America, the reality in India was different. Yeah, but reality is not what counts. It's what Hitler, Himmler and tens of thousands of other Germans thought that is the way to deal with colonized people, with colonial land, which then was put into practice. So I think it is...

a large colonial imperial mindset, settler colonial mindset which came to play in the German occupation of Eastern Europe. And it's way too long that this was completely ignored in German academia. It was only after this debate at the turn of the millennium,

that people then say, okay, yeah, we accept now. I think that was one take very satisfied with that. One part of the argument from me was taken on and everybody says, now, of course it was a colonial war. We always knew that. Yeah, but up to Wintuk to Auschwitz, almost nobody wrote about it. And it's now used to say, yeah, but the Holocaust, the Holocaust is separate.

But that is now also interesting because the question is, can you separate the Holocaust from the war of annihilation in Eastern Europe? Or can you not? And there are academic debates on that. The whole library is being filled and the German public tries to separate the Holocaust from all aspects of German history.

Juergen Zimmerer (42:28.426)
which I think is a way of coping with this incredible monstrous crime that the Holocaust was and is, and at the same time to safeguard German history from the Holocaust by saying, well, this is separate and only the separate crime.

We need to reconcile this, so we need to recognize.

Waitman Beorn (43:01.591)
This is a question that came up for me both in reading your work, but also in this conversation, which is because I've seen the vitriol with which your critics and other people have launched into this debate. And it's interesting because it seems, again, as you laid out, that Germany, at least as a state officially,

has been, I think, relatively successful, I suppose, in admitting that it's responsible for the Holocaust and condemning Nazis and condemning Nazism and these kinds of things. And nobody in Germany would sort of personally feel bad about saying that the Holocaust happened and we were responsible for it as a state and we're sorry about that. But when you turn it to Namibia,

people get very, seem to get very, very upset about it. And I'm curious, you know, sort of how we explain the attachment, I suppose, to a place that really in the grand scheme of German history is not a particularly significant place, but yet it's not like you're attacking Bismarck or, you know, Frederick the Great or, you know, something like this, you know, this is not like a huge sort of element, but yet people get very upset when you start to say that this is a colonial sort of endeavor.

Juergen Zimmerer (44:29.258)
Yeah, they're absolutely right. I mean, Namibia employs a space in German public perception which is far greater than the real...

and the pinning of it. It is simply the only country outside of Europe where you still have a German -speaking minority which you can still see. It's roughly about 20 to 30 ,000 people. As I said, it's not a huge number, but you can see that.

You can travel in Namibia and you get the German Witzhaus and you get the German cake and you get the German sausage and you get the German beer and all that and that's why it's very, very popular. It's also that, you know, it was preserved because Namibia after World War I became a South African mandate and apartheid. So they continued the racist idea of a state till still 1990 when Namibia became independent.

So there's a lot of attachment to it. A lot of people travel there and like to be in a country in Africa which is so German. That's one of it. I think the other is, and that has to do with the position of the Holocaust in the German identity. And that is that I...

couple of years done research and written about German historical memory and historical identity and how we can see a shift on the surface. Yes, German is very critical of its Nazi past, of the Holocaust. But at the same time, it creates a new narrative of Germany in Berlin, they rebuilt

Juergen Zimmerer (46:41.258)
the Imperial Palace, now the Humboldt Forum. The Bonn Republic, I think, had a very... There is an identificatory shift from the Bonn Republic to the Berlin Republic. The Berlin Republic embraces a proud perception of German history, minus...

12 years, and especially the Holocaust. Two years ago I would have said everybody accepts it. The new elections two weeks ago showed that the far right, which also challenges our commitment to Holocaust memory, is on the rise. Like in all of Europe, we have a real problem with neo -Nazism.

and they challenge everything. But the democratic middle ground, so to speak, will accept the Holocaust. But they try to say, distinguish the separate, the Holocaust from German imperial history. And say, well, there is a good German history in the 19th century, where Germany was a leading academic institution, so universities.

the arts, philosophy, all the big names, and that separated from the Holocaust. And I think the problem with the Herero Nama genocide is that it shows no, the ideas of a racist state are older than 1933. They're even older than 1919. The other narrative always started with World War I or 1914.

No, it's in the core of the time when Germany was this intellectually leading country, it also developed these racist ideas. And that I think is why they reject the talking about colonialism. Because it shows that the Holocaust and the war of annihilation in the East is much deeper rooted in German history than most people want to accept.

Waitman Beorn (49:08.696)
Yeah, and I think it's interesting just as an American, you know, looking at this, I seem like there's a similar parallel between slavery and American colonial, settler colonial sort of expansion where I think, and again, just like Germany and other places in Europe, you know, we have more and more people sort of being outwardly racist. So this may not be 100 percent.

Juergen Zimmerer (49:11.114)
Cough cough cough

Waitman Beorn (49:36.376)
the case anymore. But I feel like for a long time, at least officially, you know, nobody would defend slavery. You know, everyone would sort of recognize that, you know, American chattel slavery was an outright horrendous, you know, horrible crime based on racism, etc, etc. But if you went to talk about the American West and, you know, expansion and colonialism, then it becomes this story of, you know, the American can do spirit and

the ability to conquer difficult terrain and start a new life, et cetera, et cetera. And people would become very upset. Similarly, it seems like to Germans, if you began to point out all these other elements of racism and genocide and removing indigenous peoples. And I just think there's something really interesting about what some countries are willing to sort of criticize themselves about.

and what they're not and what they sort of think. No, this is because it suggests that certainly I think in the German case that, you know, that Nazism is really and this gets to the larger debates as well, I suppose. But the Nazism is this this sort of exception to German, Germaness and German history. And, you know, and so, like, you know, we're really sorry about what happened, but the Nazis were this sort of, you know, natural disaster that happened between 1933, 1945, but everything else.

In every other sort of circumstance, we're just great Germans that you've always heard about. And it sounds like what you're saying is that, you know, what challenges that is precisely this connection and the timing of, you know, the Herrera and Nama genocide, which suggests that, you know, that on the one hand, I suppose it should be kind of comforting in a sense, because Germans were no different in many ways than lots of other Western European countries that were.

You know, the Belgians in Congo, for example, or Americans in the West, you know, we're doing similar, similar sorts of things, right? Or no, you're shaking your head, so maybe not.

Juergen Zimmerer (51:38.154)
There are two aspects to your statement. I think it's exactly true that what you said, that we have a tendency to separate the 12 years from German history. And I said jokingly a while ago, the problem is you can make...

Hitler was responsible for almost everything, but he really was innocent for the Herero genocide. He had nothing to do with this. And that means if you want to explain this genocide, you cannot fall back. Hitler and a few Nazis, they were all innocent for the colonial because they were children or they were not yet alive.

the point I wanted to make. The other is to say the Germans were just like the Belgians in the Congo. I would not, I'm not convinced by that. I think that the Congo crimes are an incredible crime against humanity. There's 10 million people killed, but it's not a state -planned genocide. It's something else, horrendous, but not a state -planned...

genocide. What makes the German experience in Namibia peculiar is, for the first time, real large -scale military and administrative planning from day one. That is where various trends meet, the colonial trend, the settler -colonial, but all of this German

This German attempt to create everything top down, to plan, to have an order. I said, again, half jokingly, in other colonies, they wanted something, take something, they stole it. In Germany, they created a law allowing it to be taken, so it's no longer a theft. And this planning, and that's the level of...

Juergen Zimmerer (53:59.498)
of administrative structure, this crime in Namibia Head is I think quite peculiar. At the turn of the 20th century, we also look at what happens when. And I think that is late in the history of...

of colonial violence. There are various forms of violence, colonial violence even after that, but the change is formed. Here you have really this genocidal attempt, you have this racist administrative attempt at creating it. So it's not just like any other. We have to be quite specific and see what...

can be compared, where came the ideas from, etc. So it needs a lot more research in it than just the black and white, this is the same or this is the different, or we reject it.

Waitman Beorn (55:06.776)
Yeah, I mean, I think that's absolutely the case. It's one of those. I always talk about making history complex, you know, and it's it's complicated and these kinds of things. And I think this is this is a good example of that, because, you know, whenever we do comparative history, which, you know, I think we use comparisons in our daily life all the time. And that's how we understand the world. And there's nothing wrong with with this. But it's also, as you point out, you know, one has to then be specific about what comparisons we're making and, you know,

what the differences are as well, like similarities, continuities and breaks. And one of the questions that I had, you know, was what, assuming, assuming the Nazis win, you know, World War II, you know, what, what is their plan for Western Europe versus Eastern Europe? Cause I think this, this speaks directly to your point in terms of, you know, cause we've thrown around two, two separate sort of, I think, but connected terms here, which is imperialism and colonialism.

specifically settler colonialism, which are not they're they're linked often, but they're not interchangeable. They're not the same thing. Right.

Juergen Zimmerer (56:14.57)
That's a good question. I honestly had never thought about it in detail. I think, I mean, the settler colonial project in the East was an enlargement of Germany into the East. Germans were supposed to live there, supported by Slavs who would work for them. But that was Greater Germany. I think for the West, it would have been something like a German Empire.

I mean, we don't know. I mean, it's a speculation on my part as well. But what we know is that Hitler always wanted a hope for an alliance or a truce with Great Britain. He was a big admirer of Great Britain. So, I think some form of an empire would probably have emerged in Western Europe.

but in the East it would have been Germany.

Waitman Beorn (57:16.728)
Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. And I think, you know, again, one of the things that is sort of evidence of that is, again, the way that the Germans behave in Western Europe, you know, even with regards to the Holocaust, right? They're not murdering Jews, you know, in large pits in Western Europe. You know, they're deporting them to the East, which is in some way, in some sense, sort of out of mind, out of sight of what's happening. You know, they're not...

though they do it or door and other places, you know, they're not wholesale burning villages and you're destroying things the way that they're doing. It seems like with things like Vichy France, et cetera, you know, that they're just looking for client states that, you know, will do what they want them to do and will become sort of their own internal, you know, trading markets and things like this. But they're not. They're not imagining that Germans are going to go take over.

you know, land in the south of France and, you know, push out the native, the French people. And I think that says a lot about what their plans are. And again, what the difference between imperialism, which sort of seems to be control and extractive control over parts of the world and colonialism, which is control, extraction, but also, you know, settlement. And we are taking this land and we are going to live there.

Juergen Zimmerer (58:45.674)
Yeah, absolutely. And I find it also very interesting that all the death camps were in the east. So as you said Auschwitz, all of them. And that also showed that even the Nazis at the height of their power were not sure that the majority of the German people would accept the actual killing taking place in...

in Germany itself, in pre -war Germany. And they chose that they needed this colonial construction or as a colonial space of the black men, the killing fields to then enable and enact that. And then it also allowed the Germans, I think which is important, not to know. I mean, I think all Germans...

I was never convinced that Germans knew nothing, that's absurd. But the interesting thing is that because the death camps were in the east, Germans did not... you could pretend not to know. If Dachau would have been a death camp, you know, you could not ignore it. Now you can say, the political business whatsoever. We all know there are still...

Hundreds of thousands of people murdered within Germany, but still it allowed Germans to close their eyes. And that was also a function of this colonial frontier.

Waitman Beorn (01:00:20.6)
Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, and it seems like also, you know, in a metaphorical sense.

Eastern Europe, because of what the Nazis are doing, is a very sort of disrupted landscape in the sense that you have the Holocaust taking place, but you also have things like the Jamochk deportments and deportations, attempts to move Poles all over the place. And so it's just a very busy place where you can sort of, in some ways, just hide violence to a certain extent because it's just taking place everywhere.

But also, one of the things that's really interesting to me is how unsuccessful the Germans are ultimately in all of these colonial endeavors in the East. In the sense that, I mean, part of it's the war, right, and the way the war goes, but even in 39, they're having difficulty finding Germans who actually want to move to Poland and Ukraine and these kinds of places.

Juergen Zimmerer (01:01:22.154)
Yeah, but again, again, this is, you know, in Namibia, the interesting thing is they create a system of control, total control, with passports and everything. And then they ask all the district commissioners to make suggestions and they all come in and say, yeah, we could do that and we could tighten the rule here and there. And then somebody says, the problem is we don't have the pass tokens. We can't. There is no way.

to put it into practice and that shows that there is a completely disentanglement between the planning and the actual power to achieve this. But still, what has been put into practice is still murderous enough. But it shows the planning. It's a planning, I call it, one of my articles, I think, planning francy. Administrative francy, that's what takes place in the colonies.

and then in Eastern Europe. And they were successful enough to destroy millions of lives, to destroy the regions, to destroy the culture there. There is no Austjudish, well there is, but there's nothing compared like that, there before 1939 or 1941. And the plans were even bolder than that.

Waitman Beorn (01:02:49.08)
Yeah, I mean, and when we think about the impact that you sort of mentioned, you know, one of the questions that, again, I think, you know, cries out for this sort of comparative discussion is, is that of sort of, and this gets back to something we touched on a little bit earlier, but the issue of reparations and sort of official responsibility. Because as, as I understand it, you know, this is still an ongoing problem in terms of reparations for Namibia and also.

that we haven't had a really had a Willy Brandt moment. And I'm referring now to sort of the moment when Billy Brandt, you know, went to went to Warsaw and sort of in some ways officially apologized and or, you know, acknowledged German responsibility for the Holocaust. But yet this is not something that seems to be happening in this context.

Juergen Zimmerer (01:03:39.53)
Not at all. I made this comparison with Willy Brandt falling on his knees in Warsaw just a couple of weeks ago when the Namibian president died in office. So the German president Steinmeier flew to Namibia for the funeral. And he then made a short press appearance and he more or less said, I hope...

And he was foreign minister when the negotiations with Namibia started. He is president now for several years. And everybody or many people like myself say, why don't you talk about it? Why no apology? So in Namibia, he said, and I hope next time I come, I can then issue an apology. And I said in an interview on the radio, I mean,

I wonder whether Willy Brand said in Warsaw, I hope next time I come to Warsaw I can fall on my knees or whether he just did. That's what you do if you really want to set an example. And Germany again negotiates. They want to know for sure, we apologize and you accept it. We are not guilty of that, we don't have to pay that, etc. They are negotiating for years.

to say we only call it genocide if you as Namibian government, as Herero people, are willing to accept that there are no reparations to be paid. Then we pay economic aid and all this. And it's again this ministry, I think, it's a very similar tradition. You have to have a law, you have to have a... for everything.

Waitman Beorn (01:05:31.864)
I mean, is there, I just can't help comparing this to sort of, and obviously the Jews, Jewish victims of the Nazis had to fight very hard to get reparations as well, ultimately. But I wonder if there's something to sort of the, maybe a widespread acceptance at some level of racism where at least officially there isn't a widespread acceptance of.

sort of anti -Semitism that sort of allows people to still feel like there's something different about paying reparations to European Jews than there is to paying reparations to African people. Maybe I'm, maybe not, but I mean.

Juergen Zimmerer (01:06:14.25)
Well, I think there's plenty of antisemitism, so I'm not sure. So what I observed is that...

Waitman Beorn (01:06:19.928)
Of course, of course, yeah. And that's just me isn't.

Juergen Zimmerer (01:06:32.458)
The fact that Germany paid reparations was, as you said, a very difficult process and it involved a lot of international pressure. Like the forced laborers in what was it, late 1990s, where the US government pushed for it. Now I'm...

So, of observing the negotiations with Namibia for almost 10 years now, there is simply no international pressure on Germany to pay reparations for a colonial crime. Not from any former colonial power. None of them had said you have to. And I think they all know this will open Pandora's box. And that is, I think, a difference.

Then there are people who say, well, the Holocaust is a singular crime, that's why we have to pay here. The others, it's just a normal crime, we don't pay. This is now an abuse of the singularity of the Holocaust, which is evident in many aspects of singularity, to say we don't have to do it for others. I think that is a lot of racism also in it.

Waitman Beorn (01:07:54.456)
Yeah, I mean, that's that's a really fascinating observation. You know, this idea that.

that the Holocaust is.

in some ways a genocide that is distinct from the genocide of colonial colonial genocides and therefore you know those those genocides are exempt from payment because the Holocaust it goes back to speaking to this this concept that you mentioned earlier of sort of like placing the Holocaust in a box and you know and dealing with it you know in complete separation from anything that happened before.

which seems like what's going on here, right? That the government is saying, you know, look, we're not going to pay for something that was sort of acceptable at the time around the world, but the Holocaust clearly wasn't. And so we'll pay for that, you know.

Juergen Zimmerer (01:08:50.122)
The German special envoy Ruprecht Polenz for the negotiations with Namibia in 2016 or 2017 had a meeting in Windhoek with Nama, descendants of the survivors of Nama. And you must imagine they all came to the German embassy to talk to him. And he is a German envoy for the perpetrator government to negotiate with the victims.

and he lectured them. You must not compare the suffering of your grandparents with that of Jews. Because that is something else. Now you can make many arguments what's singular about the Holocaust. But I think it's unbecoming of a German envoy, you know, tasked with finding a settlement with victims to lecture them.

that the suffering of their loved ones is of a secondary nature. It's unbelievable. I mean, I can't... And it enraged the Nama so much because they really felt being put back. And that is where I think that a certain perception of the Holocaust becomes a tool...

to limit responsibility instead of what we should do is say we accept the responsibility coming from this incredible crime by standing for human rights, etc. It's used to limit actually responsibility in other cases.

Waitman Beorn (01:10:36.184)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's, and I always say that, you know, I refuse to sort of play the suffering Olympics, you know, where it's, you know, who, who suffered, you know, worse. I mean, we, there obviously are, are comparisons that can be made, but when we're talking about individuals being murdered, you know, illegally, et cetera, you know, yeah, it's, it's absolutely counterproductive to sort of suggest that, you know, your family that starved to death on shark Island or.

were shot or driven into the Omaha desert, like their suffering wasn't as bad as anybody. I mean, you know, this is not a, this is not a helpful kind of argument. But I'm really curious about, it's really interesting to see this way in which,

It seems like to me that the German response to Namibia reveals some of what you're talking about in the sense of because, and again, I'm overly generalizing here, but because Germany has done, I suppose, relatively well, at least officially, in terms of coming to terms with the Holocaust, admitting it, apologizing, doing reparations,

Is it true that in some ways the government likes then to say, to point that out and say, look, look how well we've done with regards to the Holocaust. But then it's embarrassing if you point out Namibia, because they, it goes against sort of their arguments of like, look how, you know, we've taken responsibility and we're doing such, such sort of forward looking, positive progressive things with regards to this genocide. But then if you, if you point out Namibia,

that is kind of like a counter narrative to that.

Juergen Zimmerer (01:12:21.066)
Well, the interesting thing is why the debates are so emotional and so intense in Germany is actually that I think my generation comes from this fighting for an acceptance of the historical guilt. Because it's not from day one. It's not like German society after World War II embraced the responsibility and guilt. That was fought for.

by civil society groups in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s. And it was a grassroot movement. And later on it was embraced by the people, by the elites. And we think this is a huge achievement. And I think we want it universalized. We want to say, okay, enlarge it also to all racist incidents. It's a good thing. And there are others who want to limit it.

And they use now the singularity and the singular aspects to say only the singular crime, because the rest is just an ordinary crime. Now, I think that's a completely absurd lesson to draw from history to say that you only need to acknowledge singular crimes. In a way, all crimes are singular. That universalist lesson has to be the lesson.

As a consequence of the Third Reich, we combat racism, anti -Semitism, any folkish ideas. We welcome migrants, etc. I think what we see, for example, is sometimes... That would be another, I think, cut is out. Because I need soon to go have a doctor's appointment in an hour.

Just a few more minutes, but sorry, I would love to go on.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:18.648)
No, I was gonna, no, it's fine. I was gonna close in a second anyway, you know, on that.

Juergen Zimmerer (01:14:28.33)
Just cut the last half of the sentence out, I think.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:28.632)
So yeah, yeah, no, that's fine. So, you know, we've taken a lot of your time. You're going to really appreciate coming on. And so I want to ask our sort of our closing question, which is what is what is one book on the Holocaust that you would recommend for for our listeners?

Juergen Zimmerer (01:14:48.65)
for me, eye -opening was anything by Sigmund Baumann, and particularly modernity and the Holocaust. Because it really opened up a thinking in relationships and saying that, offering analytical tools to understand very complex events in relationship to each other.

Waitman Beorn (01:15:17.272)
Well, awesome. Thank you so much for coming on and to our listeners. Once again, thank you for listening. Please, if you have a moment, give us a rating and a response, a comment. We always love to hear sort of what we're doing and what we're doing well, hopefully. And Jorgen, again, thank you so much for taking the time to come on.

Juergen Zimmerer (01:15:39.754)
Thank you, it was a pleasure.