On 2 October 1904, General Lothar von Trotha addressed the Herero people: "Within the German borders every Herero, with or without a rifle, with or without cattle, will be shot." This sentence is in the German military archives[5].
- Duration
- 1904 – 1908
- Territory
- German South-West Africa (today Namibia)
- Sovereign
- Kaiser Wilhelm II
- Commander
- Lt-Gen Lothar von Trotha
- Herero killed
- ≈65,000 (≈80% of population)
- Nama killed
- ≈10,000 (≈50% of population)
How it began
The Herero uprising of January 1904
German colonisation of South-West Africa from 1884 took Herero land, cattle, water sources, and women. The Herero, led by paramount chief Samuel Maharero, rose against German settlers in January 1904. They killed around 123 German civilians. They explicitly spared women, children, missionaries, English-speaking traders, and the Boers.
Berlin's response was disproportionate even by the standards of colonial warfare. Trotha was dispatched with 14,000 troops and explicit instructions to "destroy" rather than negotiate.
The Vernichtungsbefehl
The extermination order
At the Battle of Waterberg in August 1904 Trotha encircled the Herero on three sides and left the fourth — eastwards into the Omaheke desert — deliberately open. He drove the survivors into it. His soldiers were ordered to poison the waterholes and to shoot any Herero who attempted to return.
“The Herero people must leave this land. If they do not, I will force them with the Groot Rohr (cannon). Within the German borders every Herero, with or without a rifle, with or without cattle, will be shot. I no longer accept women and children.”
The camps
Shark Island, Swakopmund, the Lüderitz works
When the policy of starvation in the Omaheke became internationally embarrassing, Berlin ordered the survivors interned in concentration camps. The largest, on Shark Island in Lüderitz Bay, had a mortality rate above 60%. Survivors worked the harbour, railways, and German settler farms — many in chains.
Medical experimentation on prisoners — including by Eugen Fischer, later a leading Nazi racial theorist — produced the racial-science research that would be cited in Mein Kampf and built into the Nuremberg laws[10].
The through-line
What this had to do with what came after
Historians Jürgen Zimmerer, Benjamin Madley and others have traced what they call the "colonial-genocide continuum" from German South-West Africa to the Holocaust: shared personnel (Hermann Göring's father was governor of South-West Africa; Eugen Fischer trained Josef Mengele), shared techniques (concentration camps, racial classification, extermination orders), shared bureaucratic templates[10].
The argument is not that the Holocaust was a colonial event — it is that the Holocaust did not arrive without precedent. The precedent was practised on Africans first.
Casualty math
How the 75,000 figure is built
Chronology
Key dates
1884
Germany annexes South-West Africa.
1903 Oct
Nama Bondelswarts uprising — initial revolt.
1904 Jan
Herero rise under Samuel Maharero.
1904 Aug
Battle of Waterberg — Herero driven into the Omaheke desert.
1904 Oct
Trotha issues the Vernichtungsbefehl.
1905
Nama rise under Hendrik Witbooi. Extermination order extended.
1905–07
Concentration camps at Shark Island, Swakopmund, Karibib, Windhoek.
1908
Camps closed. Surviving Herero and Nama assigned to forced labour on settler farms.
1948
South African Blue Book on the genocide is recalled and pulped under apartheid government pressure.
2021
Germany formally recognises the genocide; pledges €1.1bn over 30 years. Herero and Nama groups reject the deal.