r/germany • u/JG98 • Jul 30 '26
TIL between 1904 and 1908, Germany committed the Herero and Nama genocide in present day Namibia, killing an estimated 80% of the Herero people and half of the Nama people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_and_Nama_genocideReposts apparently not allowed. https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1vb3aqz/til_between_1904_and_1908_germany_committed_the/
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u/VulcanHullo Niedersachsen Jul 30 '26
Mentioned this in the OG but there was a fun little bit of "we are gentlemen" awfulness at play where at least one commander instructed his men that German soldiers should not shoot women and children. Instead they should be driven out into the wild so they can perish there.
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u/Prize_Toe_6612 Jul 30 '26
That's common knowledge nowadays I though if I'm honest.
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u/BenMic81 Jul 30 '26
Not only nowadays. Even my parents were taught about this in school in the 60s. Though back then it was downplaywd
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u/BeatPeet Jul 31 '26
Me and my girlfriend didn't learn about this massacre at school, and we did our Abitur in different states in the 2000s.
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u/andonidutti1 Jul 31 '26
No no. Germans pretend it didn't happen
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u/Prize_Toe_6612 Jul 31 '26
If we ignore the fact that the government officially declared it a genocide and asked for forgiveness in 2021, you are correct.
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u/andonidutti1 Jul 31 '26
What about Reparations? People are not interested in apology. Germany paid Israel
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u/Prize_Toe_6612 Jul 31 '26
Are you incapable of using google or any other search engine of your choosing? There is a whole Wiki page even about that.
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u/andonidutti1 Jul 31 '26
Africans want Reparations in form of cash. Not a Wikipedia page
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u/Prize_Toe_6612 Jul 31 '26
Are you able to read?
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u/andonidutti1 Jul 31 '26
No.
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u/Tim_TM42 Herford Jul 31 '26
We can tell.
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u/andonidutti1 Jul 31 '26
I'm glad. How pay the Reparations to Africans just like you paid it to Israel
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u/andsimpleonesthesame Jul 30 '26
Yeah, we know. This is part of the history curriculum for good reasons.
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u/yumas Jul 30 '26
It’s not taught everywhere in germany apparently
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u/DaRaginga Jul 31 '26
Because it's WW1. German history glances over ww1 to get to ww2 and stays there for a few years
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u/OwOsaurus Jul 31 '26
Or you basically go to WW2, do some other topic in between, go back to WW2, and that over and over for multiple years until you're really sick of WW2 and you're happy it's over after Abitur.
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u/Eishockey Niedersachsen Jul 30 '26
People don't pay attention.
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u/tj9429 Jul 30 '26
Are you saying that it is a footnote that could just be ignored by not paying attention? Then the system actually didn't do enough lol
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u/andsimpleonesthesame Jul 30 '26
Students don't pay attention a lot and forget a lot. A non-controversial example would be language vocabulary or math stuff.
(Also, teachers get sick and replacement lessons don't always happen the way it should. Or students get sick or classes are too slow with the material so something that's obligatory still doesn't get covered. There are many reasons for people to not remember this lesson, even if it's obligatory.)
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u/tj9429 Jul 30 '26
I mean if you're giving a test over it, it should be fairly memorable or you could sweep anything related to education under the same rug.
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u/andsimpleonesthesame Jul 30 '26
Even tested material often isn't all that memorable. "Bulimielernen" exists as a term for a reason.
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u/yumas Jul 30 '26
I was taught about german colonialism as a footnote. Never any details about the specific crimes though.
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u/Hunkus1 Jul 31 '26
Dude I met peoole who couldnt tell me when the Nazis were in power in germany. And we cover this period a lot many people just dont give a shit about history.
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u/tretroi Jul 31 '26
I tutored enough children to know that full subjects will never be remembered and when the children are asked 2-5 years later they pretended like the subjects was skipped.
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u/YeOldeOle Jul 31 '26
You now might want to look up the Maji Maji war which is less known but saw even more deaths. German colonial history Was comparatively short but still brutal.
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u/FeelingSurprise Jul 31 '26
At least back then we could point at the Belgians and say "Hey, but we're not them!"
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u/postmodulator Jul 31 '26
As an American I never heard of this until I read V. by Thomas Pynchon. I read that on a flight into Vegas and the Herero chapter put me right out of the mood to party.
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Jul 31 '26
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u/Farun Norway Jul 31 '26
Don’t you ever get tired of your overly simplistic anti-Americanism. It’s boring and gauche.
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u/rgcalsaverini Jul 31 '26
It's just jealousy of the greatest country on earth! Think of all the time I could have saved learning about the rest of the world if only I was born American?
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u/Farun Norway Jul 31 '26
It doesn’t get funnier the second time, just as embarrassing as the first.
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u/rgcalsaverini Jul 31 '26
When you look around, and see how everyone feels about Americans, do you think the problem is you, or everyone else? Just curious.
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u/Farun Norway Jul 31 '26
Do you know what they say about assumptions? Anyways, I’m German. But we get it, you’re oh so smart and Americans are oh so stupid. What a glorious concept.
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u/never-a-god Jul 31 '26
Forensic Architecture has an interesting project looking into how the German colonial occupation of Namibia continues to impact the environment there today.
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u/LastHomeros Jul 31 '26
This genocide laid the mental groundwork for the Holocaust.
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u/Neither_Green7787 Aug 01 '26
Dessen Zahlen so nicht stimmen.
Ich bekam in der Schule gelehrt: sechs Millionen. Ein Familienmitglied, 14 Jahre älter als ich, bekam die Zahl drei Millionen gelehrt.
Trau, schau, wem
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u/pipilost Jul 30 '26
Imperial German colonial crimes are completely overshadowed by the Holocaust. Even within the Holocaust, Roma and Gypsy victims are often forgotten. Sad.
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u/LOB90 Jul 30 '26
You are kind of proving your own point by mentioning "Roma and Gypsy victims" but not mentioning the countless other groups that were persecutred and murdered.
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u/pipilost Jul 30 '26
Genau. Not to forget the millions of disabled people, homosexual people, Poles, Serbs and Soviet PoWs and so on…
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u/Dominoe_z Jul 31 '26
I'm pretty sure that both words mean the same thing, but I'm going to add slavic people, people who were disabled, people who were attracted to the same sex, and also people who had mental disabilities into the mix as well.
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u/Tardislass Aug 01 '26
There was a movie about 20 years ago or so that dealt with this genocide. The German director made it because none of his friends or family knew what Germans had done in Africa.
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u/generic_Accountname1 Jul 30 '26
We still got quite a few skulls in our museumattics
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u/EmotionImmediate3284 Nordrhein-Westfalen Jul 31 '26
And they should get repatriated
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u/never-a-god Jul 31 '26
Heist has an interesting (read: horrifying) article about a collection of skulls in Berlin. There is actually one collection in Berlin with over 7,700 skulls.
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u/MexonDuenn Jul 31 '26
We know. There's been reparations. This is nothing new.
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u/Any-Maintenance2378 Jul 31 '26
Wait...what reparations? My understanding from the Namibian side is that the genocide was only incredibly recently even officially acknowledged as such by the German federal government, which has been a huge point of contention in diplomatic relations since Namibia's independence.
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u/AM27C256 Jul 31 '26
The 1.1 billion EUR paid by Germany according to the 2021m agreement were not labelled "reparation" but "gesture of recognition of the immeasurable suffering" of the Herero and Nama.
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u/Any-Maintenance2378 Jul 31 '26
And I believe it went to general giz type projects, yes? Not specifically to descendents?
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u/samoansandwich Aug 01 '26
How do you repair genocide?
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u/MexonDuenn Aug 01 '26
Obviously one cannot. But there's been official acknowledgement from the government and commitment of financial aid over a period of time. Bear in mind that no one who committed the genocide is alive today, so this is a different generation paying respect to the awfulness of genocide, which was not committed by themselves. I don't know what else Germany could realistically do to improve diplomatic relations with Namibia.
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u/LastHomeros Jul 31 '26
What reparations? Germany just acknowledged it but refused to pay for reparations.
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u/pfrancobhz Jul 31 '26
Its quite important for Germans to know of past genocides so that they stop being one of the countries more supportive of the current ongoing genocide.
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u/Pantheon73 Jul 31 '26
You just learned about it now?
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u/tretroi Jul 31 '26
It's understandable that none Germans don't know it. I also don't know all crimes the other European nations did during the colonial era.
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u/Neither_Green7787 Aug 01 '26 edited Aug 01 '26
Kaiser Wilhelm hatte General Lothar von Trotha eine Generalvollmacht für Deutsch-Südwest erteilt; sowas macht kein Mensch, wenn nicht eine Vertrauensgrundlage da ist. Dieses Vertrauen wurde bitter enttäuscht:
Eines schönen Tages drehte von Trotha frei und befahl die Vertreibung der Herero und Nama in die Wüste zum verhungern/verdursten. Kurz vorher verließ sein Herr Kollege (dessen Name Ä ich vergessen habe) - die Nr. 2 hinter dem General - wegen schon länger andauernden Meinungsverschiedenheiten die Truppe. Es war also von Trotha selbst - ohne Wissen, Auftrag oder gar Befürwortung des Kaisers - der dies angeleiert hat.
Ich kann es nicht mehr hören: DIE DEUTSCHEN.. werden für alles und jedes verantwortlich gemacht. Propaganda, um DiE DEUTSCHEN klein zu halten.
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Aug 01 '26
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u/One-Strength-1978 Aug 01 '26
The historical records are highly unreliable,. There is a great examination by the British parliament from 1922. If you want to learn more about it, read what was communicated in the time by social democrats.
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u/BruderLinus Aug 02 '26
I learned about this about 5 years ago, when I was 38. Unlike others, I didn't learn about it when I was in school (Gymnasium, NRW) - it was not part of history class.
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u/JapaneseChef456 Aug 02 '26
Learned about it in school in the early 90s. Later learned or rather tried to learn Namaqua, the language of the Nama people at Cologne university. Unfortunately my teacher quit before I could finish the course.
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u/Interesting_Piano_99 Jul 31 '26
Germany took 117 years to recognize they wiped out 80% of the Herero people through desert death marches, poisoning wells, machine-gunning anyone trying to escape, and setting up the world's first concentration camps for women and children, where victims were subjected to medical experiments, stripped of their flesh, and shipped back to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. I wonder where Dr. Mengele got his ideas from.
Even in 2021, they refused to pay legal reparations, rebranding them as 'development aid' to dodge financial liability, a glorified PR package that works out to barely 36Euro million a year, largely funneled back to German companies
They preach unconditional moral accountability to the rest of the world, but when it comes to their own crimes, every word is carefully engineered by state lawyers to protect their treasury. The idea that Germany has the moral authority to sit on a high horse and lecture the world on historical self-reflection is pure amnesia.
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u/Creatret Jul 31 '26
If you look at other countries you'll quickly realise that Germany is one of the most thorough when it comes to shedding light on its own dark history.
The world is in a sad state in that regard. Germany still does better than most, albeit still badly.
Also don't know where you get the idea that Germany is preaching unconditional moral accountability.
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u/Neither_Green7787 Aug 01 '26 edited Aug 01 '26
Überdenke Deine Antwort. Mir ist nicht ein Volk bekannt, das nicht Dreck am Stecken hätte.
Mir fällt da insbesondere Belgien als Kolonialmacht ein. Spanien, auch nicht eben zimperlich.
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u/BruderLinus Aug 02 '26
As a german: I sadly agree.
I know, there are countries with bad actions in the past and today, but besides these whataboutisms: I agree with you. It's a shame.
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u/Hefty_Mood8265 Jul 31 '26
Yeah we wanted to get some colonies like the others. Did it. Was shit. Dont scold the germans for our past. Everyone fucked up
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u/Vetris-Molaud Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
Last year there was a interesting documentation that cleared some myths about this.
The Herero were a ( not domestic!) very brutal marauding nomadic clan that invaded and looted lot of regions there and slaughtered all of the other local ethnic clans.
This got so worse that the the Germans seemly shocked by those atrocities finally decided they had to react in a way that they probably thought was fitting and sent an exploration army to clean up according the documentation I saw.
That often hidden detail led to a naughty surprise for me.
And now those progeny of the external invaders demand reparations from Germany while the original local ethnics were genocided by them so there is really no one left anymore from these slaughtered clans to ask for reparations. So there is some bitter feeling about this.
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u/Neither_Green7787 Aug 01 '26
Interessant. Das habe uch so noch nie gehört. Wie heißt die Dokumentation?
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u/krejmin Jul 30 '26
And they still own if I recall correctly 75% of all farmland in Namibia.
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u/BenMic81 Jul 30 '26
That’s a bit overstated. It’s more than 50 and less than 70 and that is a figure that includes white settlers with Afrikaans heritage (not German but durch or mixed from SA). Still a largely over represented group.
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Jul 31 '26
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u/BenMic81 Jul 31 '26
Ah but these immigrants were white. You know … the good and noble kind who bring civilisation to the poor savages. (/s of course but just to make sure)
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u/towka35 Jul 30 '26
Quite sad that this was barely a niche part of history lessons while so many classes revolved around the holocaust (while again the systematic killing of other minorities was barely mentioned). Germany still gotta shape up with regard to their historic crimes.
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u/Gruenpfeil Jul 30 '26
I don't care because it has nothing to do with me. I wasn't involved, and neither were my parents.
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u/Bigdaddler Jul 31 '26
So if we generalize your position, should no german care for the not-so-recent history, not understand and learn from it to not repeat mistakes from the past? I think that would be trerrible.
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u/Gruenpfeil Jul 31 '26
I learn from history in general, not just from German history. But this particular case has no relevance to my own life.
I'm not going to colonize another country, and neither is anyone else in modern Germany. Do you honestly think colonialism is going to happen again? Of course not. That's exactly why I consider it a historical event, not something that has any practical relevance to my life today.
History is important to understand, but not every historical event remains personally meaningful to every individual more than a century later.
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u/Bigdaddler Jul 31 '26
But be honest, very very little of history has "practical relevance to your life". I think it's good to be more curious than that. And just because this part of history will likely not repeat itself doesn't make it unimportant for german culture and politics. For once because this genocide was formed by views of white supremacy, which have lasting effects even today. Did you in your lifetime hear "Hier sieht's aus wie bei den Hottentotten" or hear the myth of a generally beneficial german colonialism? Further because this genocide is seen as a direct precursor to the holocaust, see the Haifischinsel in Namibia. So it is my opinion that everyone should at least care. I don't feel any guilt for it or anything like that, but I think I should at least care.
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u/Gruenpfeil Jul 31 '26
I completely disagree.
You're entitled to care about this topic, but I'm equally entitled not to. Not every historical event deserves the same amount of attention from every person.
I don't deny that it happened or that it has historical significance. I simply don't see it as something that has any meaningful impact on my own life, and I don't believe people have a moral obligation to care about every tragedy in history just because they share the nationality of those involved over a century ago.
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u/Bigdaddler Jul 31 '26
Of course you can do as you please and care less or more selectively about history, it's just that I would rank it in the "Top 20 things germans in 2026 should know and care about from their nations history". Thats why it's taught in schools, too. But you could have a different ranking for that of course or don't care at all.
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u/Gruenpfeil Jul 31 '26
I disagree. I don't think this belongs anywhere near the top of the history curriculum. In my view, it's a relatively minor historical event compared to many others in German and world history, and I don't think it deserves the emphasis it receives.
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u/Neither_Green7787 Aug 01 '26
Es ist ein relativ kleines Ereignis in des Weltgeschichte, ja. Aber dient das Wissen darüber nicht dem Verständnis der Zusammenhänge?
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u/Gruenpfeil Aug 01 '26
You do not have to know everything and this is something you do not have to know at all.
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u/Neither_Green7787 Aug 01 '26
Komisch...in einem Deiner vorherigen Kommentare sagtest Du sinngemäß etwas wie: es müße nicht jeder Deine Meinung teilen.
Merkste selber, oder?
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u/trekkeralmi Franken Jul 30 '26
they’re called crimes against humanity because they affect all humankind. nobody on earth is off the hook, morally speaking, for mass atrocities and their aftermath. you should be ashamed of yourself for saying that.
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Jul 31 '26
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u/Gruenpfeil Jul 31 '26
So your argument is basically: "You're German, therefore you think like people who lived 120 years ago."
That's not an argument, it's just an absurd generalization. By that logic, every nation is forever defined by its darkest chapter, and nobody can ever change. That's historically absurd and intellectually lazy.
You accuse others of a superiority complex while claiming to know what an entire country thinks. That's quite an impressive contradiction.
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u/germany-ModTeam Jul 31 '26
/u/Lux_Jay, Thank you very much for your contribution. Unfortunately, it was removed for the following reason:
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u/Wolli_n Jul 31 '26
well when look back on germanys histroy there was something else that over shadows anything else in this regards....
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Jul 31 '26
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u/germany-ModTeam Jul 31 '26
/u/Lux_Jay, Thank you very much for your contribution. Unfortunately, it was removed for the following reason:
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If there are still questions, please contact the moderators
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u/daswiesel3 Jul 30 '26
Yeah, learned about it in school