The German colonial empire is sometimes treated as a footnote — too short to matter. The historians who study its through-line to 1933–45 disagree[10].
- Duration
- 1884 – 1919
- Peak territory
- ≈3 million km²
- Largest holdings
- GSWA (835,000 km²), GEA (995,000 km²)
- Herero & Nama dead
- ≈75,000 (1904–1908)
- Maji Maji rebellion dead
- 75,000 – 300,000 (1905–1907)
- Lost at
- Treaty of Versailles, 1919
Phase one
Land grab, 1884 – 1900
Otto von Bismarck, having previously dismissed colonies as luxury, joined the scramble at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85. Germany acquired South-West Africa, East Africa, Cameroon, and Togoland in quick succession, and the Pacific holdings shortly after. Administration was handed to chartered companies, then taken into the state after their financial failures.
Phase two
South-West Africa: the first 20th-century genocide
The Herero rising of January 1904 met the most explicit extermination order in the modern colonial record. General Lothar von Trotha's Vernichtungsbefehl of 2 October 1904 instructed German troops to shoot "every Herero, with or without a rifle, with or without cattle" inside the German borders. The Nama rising of 1905 was met with the same policy. Survivors were held in concentration camps; Shark Island had a mortality above 60%[10].
“The colonial experience in South-West Africa created an institutional and personal continuity with the Nazi system that historians can no longer ignore.”
Researchers at Shark Island — including Eugen Fischer, later a leading Nazi racial theorist and mentor to Josef Mengele — used Herero and Nama skulls and prisoners for racial-science experiments. See the dedicated page on the Herero & Nama Genocide.
Phase three
East Africa & Maji Maji, 1905 – 1907
The Maji Maji rebellion across southern German East Africa was triggered by forced cotton cultivation. German suppression — pioneered by Governor Gustav Adolf von Götzen — used scorched-earth tactics: burning villages, destroying granaries, starving regions into submission. The post-rebellion famine killed many more than the fighting; estimates run from 75,000 to 300,000.
The through-line
Why this matters disproportionately to its size
Hermann Göring's father, Heinrich Ernst Göring, was Imperial Commissioner of German South-West Africa. The personnel, the bureaucratic forms, the concentration-camp template, the racial-science legitimation — all crossed from the African colonies into the German metropole and re-emerged in the policies of the 1930s and 1940s. The argument from Zimmerer, Madley, Schaller and others is not that colonialism caused the Holocaust. It is that the Holocaust did not arrive without rehearsal.
Today
Recognition, reparations, the unfinished bill
In May 2021 Germany became the first European state to use the word genocide for its own colonial conduct, acknowledging the 1904–1908 campaign against the Herero and Nama. The accompanying €1.1 billion was framed as "development aid" payable over thirty years, not as reparations, and the OvaHerero Traditional Authority and the Nama Traditional Leaders Association have rejected it as negotiated without descendant participation. Court cases brought in New York and Windhoek continue.
The skulls are a separate ledger. Hundreds of Herero, Nama and Maji Maji remains taken to German anthropology collections between 1904 and 1914 are still being identified and, slowly, returned — the Charité repatriated twenty in 2011, a further twenty-one in 2014, and Berlin's Ethnologisches Museum continues to inventory holdings under the 2018 framework on colonial-era acquisitions.
Chronology
Key dates
1884
Germany annexes South-West Africa, Togoland, Kamerun.
1885
German East Africa Company chartered.
1904–08
Herero & Nama genocide in South-West Africa.
1905–07
Maji Maji rebellion and its suppression.
1918
Germany defeated in WWI; colonial empire dismantled.
1919
Treaty of Versailles formally transfers colonies to mandate powers.
2021
Germany formally recognises the Herero & Nama genocide; offers €1.1bn development funding (rejected by descendant groups).
In short
What did the German colonial empire do?
Germany held colonies for only about thirty years, from 1884 to 1918, and in that time committed the first genocide of the twentieth century: between 1904 and 1908 in German South West Africa, roughly 80% of the Herero and 50% of the Nama were killed by extermination order, desert encirclement and concentration camps.
German rule also crushed the Maji Maji uprising in East Africa (1905–07) with a scorched-earth famine that killed an estimated 200,000–300,000 people, and ran forced-labour plantations in Cameroon, Togo and Samoa.
The ledger
Thirty years, four continents
| Colony | Method | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| South West Africa, 1904–08 | Extermination order, camps, desert encirclement | ≈80% of Herero, ≈50% of Nama killed |
| East Africa, 1905–07 | Scorched-earth suppression of Maji Maji | ≈200,000–300,000 deaths |
| Cameroon & Togo | Plantation forced labour, flogging | High mortality, poorly recorded |
| Samoa & New Guinea | Copra and phosphate extraction | Indentured Chinese and Melanesian labour |
| 1918–present | Skulls and remains taken for race science | Partial repatriations since 2011 |
Mid-range scholarly estimates; sources listed below.
Method
The extermination order and the camps
On 2 October 1904 General Lothar von Trotha issued the Vernichtungsbefehl — an order that every Herero found within German territory, armed or not, would be shot. Survivors were driven into the Omaheke desert, where wells were poisoned or guarded. Those captured were held in camps, the largest on Shark Island at Lüderitz, where mortality among prisoners exceeded 50% and where forced labour built the colony's railways.
Skulls and skeletal remains were shipped to German universities for craniometric research. Some of the personnel and much of the vocabulary of that research reappeared in the racial science of the 1930s.
Reckoning
Recognition without reparations
Germany formally recognised the killings as genocide in May 2021 and offered €1.1bn in development aid over thirty years. Herero and Nama representative organisations rejected the settlement: it was negotiated with the Namibian state rather than with the affected communities, it explicitly avoids the word reparations, and it creates no legal liability.
Repatriation of human remains began in 2011 and continues in small tranches. The 1907 Native Ordinances that dispossessed Herero and Nama land are the direct origin of Namibia's still-unresolved land distribution.
FAQ
Frequently asked
- Was the Herero and Nama genocide the first genocide of the 20th century?
- It is generally identified as such. Between 1904 and 1908 in German South West Africa, roughly 80% of the Herero population and 50% of the Nama were killed under an explicit extermination order, with concentration camps and desert encirclement as instruments.
- How long did Germany have colonies?
- About 34 years, from the 1884 Berlin Conference to the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, which stripped Germany of all overseas possessions and transferred them to Britain, France, Belgium, South Africa, Japan, Australia and New Zealand as mandates.
- Has Germany paid reparations to Namibia?
- No. Germany recognised the genocide in 2021 and pledged €1.1bn in development aid over thirty years, deliberately framed as aid rather than reparations. Herero and Nama organisations rejected it for excluding them from negotiations.
- What was the Maji Maji rebellion?
- A 1905–07 uprising across southern German East Africa against forced cotton cultivation. German forces destroyed crops and villages to break it, producing a famine that killed an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 people.
- What was Shark Island?
- A concentration camp at Lüderitz in German South West Africa, operating 1905–07, where Herero and Nama prisoners were held in forced labour. Mortality exceeded 50%; some remains were sent to German institutions for race research.
