The German genocide in Namibia in the early 20^th century has so many similarities with what is happening in Gaza that the reader sometimes feels the leadership of the Israeli Defence Force and Netanyahu studied it and decided to apply its lessons. 

David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen’s book The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide recovers for a wider audience an episode of European and African history that is largely unknown. Even inside Namibia there are few memorials to the first planned genocide of the pre-war period and for decades many of the mass graves were unmarked.  

The part of southwest Africa we now call Namibia was inhabited by several tribal groups with pastoral economies in which cattle represented wealth and private ownership of land was unknown. German imperialism decided that this was territory ripe for colonisation as a means of getting rid of some of the urban poor and restoring to them a mystical connection between Volk and soil. The idea was that urbanisation has broken this spiritual link.  

Everything that we hear to explain the eradication of Palestinian society can be found in the German arguments to remove the Nama, Herero and Witbooi from their land.  Biblical justifications were used; the Germans represented civilisation supplanting barbarism; the occupants of the land didn’t know how to fully exploit it. 

Netanyahu and Von Trotha 

Prefiguring what the Israelis are saying and doing by corralling the people of Gaza into the ruins of cities in a desert, the German commander Von Trotha wrote to the General Staff in Berlin “the Negroes will only yield to brute force, whereas negotiations are quite pointless…They will either meet their doom in the sandveld or try to cross into Bechuanaland”.  

A German officer’s account of the expulsion of the Herero could describe Gaza today:  

“Here, the entire people, with its wagons and thousands of animals, all women and children and warriors had moved in hasty flight…along the route  there lay all kinds of junk which the fleeing people had cast away so as to be able to run faster.”. 

Like the Israelis, the Germans indiscriminately shelled and shot the civilian population to force them to move. Through a combination of killing with weapons, disease, starvation and labour camps it’s estimated that the Germans wiped out about 70% of the region’s population in a decade.  

Major Thomas O’Reilly, a British army doctor, thoroughly documented the genocide when the Germans lost control of the territory during the war but in the post Versailles world it suited the Germans, British and South Africans to allow the history to be forgotten. Much of the Nazi and apartheid legal theory on racial segregation was developed by the Germans in Africa and was adopted with minor changes. 

Of course there was resistance. Jacob Morenga, known as the black Napoleon, conducted a very effective guerrilla campaign before being killed by South African forces who dreaded the example he was setting.  

A strength of the book is that it sets out the direct line from the racist ideology common to all the European imperialists to the codification of the pseudo-science and legislation which were used to justify the Holocaust. It even names the individuals who were involved in both projects.  That was the application of the ideas and techniques developed by the imperialists to colonise Africa applied in the Nazi colonisation of Europe with a much higher level of technology and infinitely more resources.  

No two historical events are identical. Today no one can say they do not know what is happening in Gaza with the active support of the British and American governments and their armed forces. As a result there is a huge international movement in opposition to it which didn’t exist in the early 20^th century. It would also be stupid and wrong to say that what the Israelis are doing is directly comparable to what the Nazis did, but it is right to say that what they are doing in Gaza with 21^st century technology owes much to the methods the Germans perfected in Namibia.