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Today marks 121 years since the German Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha issued an order calling for the extermination of the Herero and Nama people in Namibia. In the months that followed, an estimated 50,000 - 60,000 Herero (80% of the population) and 10,000 - 20,000 Nama people (50% of the population) were murdered in a brutal genocide that scholars have identified as a forerunner to Germany’s crimes of the 20th century.
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Despite the severity of the crimes, Germany has long denied that these actions amounted to genocide and resisted the payment of reparations. Despite Germany's recent commitment to pay Namibia €1.1 billion over a period of 30 years, they referred to the payment as "aid," avoiding the implication of moral obligation.
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In “Two Kinds of Staatsräson,” excerpted from Hyper-Zionism. Germany, the Nazi Past, and Israel, edited by Hans-Kundnani and published by Verso Books in September, the historian Jürgen Zimmerer argues that it is Germany’s insistence on the singularity of the Holocaust that allows it to avoid responsibility for the genocide.
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Jürgen Zimmerer
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In January 2024, the late Namibian president Hage Geingob condemned what he called Germany’s “shocking decision” to support Israel in opposing the charges of genocide brought against it by South Africa at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). He pointed out that in what is now Namibia, Germany had committed the first genocide of the twentieth century, in which tens of thousands of innocent people had died in the most inhumane and brutal conditions. Germany, he said, had “yet to fully atone for the genocide it committed on Namibian soil.” The decision to support Israel was further evidence of “Germany’s inability to draw lessons from its horrific history.”
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What was striking about the dispute was not just that Germany and Namibia were intervening on opposing sides of the case in the ICJ, but that Namibia also drew a clear connection between what was happening in Gaza — which it, like South Africa, saw as genocide — and the genocide that had been committed by Germany in Namibia a hundred years ago. By also linking this colonial crime to the Holocaust, Geingob raised questions that have been at the center of debates about Germany’s memory culture in the last few years and that have become even more fraught since 7 October.
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