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German Colonialism

A late, short, and exceptionally violent empire. The thirty years from 1884 to 1918 set down precedents the next thirty years would extend.

Herero survivors after the German campaign, c.1907
Herero survivors after the 1904–1908 German campaign. Estimates put the population collapse at ≈80%.Source — Bundesarchiv / Wikimedia Commons

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.”
Jürgen Zimmerer · Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz? (2011)

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.

After the extermination order — Shark Island
Surviving Herero in chains, German South-West Africa, c.1907. The system of camps tested here was the prototype of what twentieth-century Europe would build at home.Source — Bundesarchiv / Wikimedia Commons

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

  1. 1884

    Germany annexes South-West Africa, Togoland, Kamerun.

  2. 1885

    German East Africa Company chartered.

  3. 1904–08

    Herero & Nama genocide in South-West Africa.

  4. 1905–07

    Maji Maji rebellion and its suppression.

  5. 1918

    Germany defeated in WWI; colonial empire dismantled.

  6. 1919

    Treaty of Versailles formally transfers colonies to mandate powers.

  7. 2021

    Germany formally recognises the Herero & Nama genocide; offers €1.1bn development funding (rejected by descendant groups).

From the Archive

Wikimedia-sourced photographs and documents related to this page.

Herero survivors 1907
Herero survivors of the 1904 German extermination order, present-day Namibia.Source — Wikimedia Commons · Public domain
Herero prisoners in chains
Herero prisoners chained by German colonial forces, 1907. The methods were studied by later European militarists.Source — Wikimedia Commons · Public domain
Colonial Africa, 1913
Africa in 1913. Twenty-eight years after the Berlin Conference, only Ethiopia and Liberia remained nominally independent.Source — Wikimedia Commons · Public domain

Last updated 23 June 2026Submit a correctionMethodology

References

Sources — German Colonialism

  1. [1]Bartolomé de las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Seville, 1552).
  2. [2]Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
  3. [3]Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America (Monthly Review Press, 1971; English 1973).
  4. [4]Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
  5. [5]Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa (Random House, 1991).
  6. [6]Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (Hurst, 2017).
  7. [7]Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (Henry Holt, 2005).
  8. [8]Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Wisconsin, 2009).
  9. [9]Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).
  10. [10]Jürgen Zimmerer, "The birth of the Ostland out of the spirit of colonialism", Patterns of Prejudice 39:2 (2005), on the German South-West Africa → Holocaust lineage.
  11. [11]Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Bogle-L'Ouverture, 1972).
  12. [12]Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867), Chapter 31 ("Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist").

All works cited in good faith for documentary, educational and critical use. Errors and omissions: contact the archive.