The Servants of Empire: Sponsored German Women’s Colonization in Southwest Africa, 1896-1945 9781800737846

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The Servants of Empire

The Servants of Empire Sponsored German Women’s Colonization in Southwest Africa, 1896–1945

 K. Molly O’Donnell

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2023 K. Molly O’Donnell

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: O’Donnell, K. Molly, author. Title: The servants of empire : sponsored German women’s colonization in Southwest Africa, 1896–1945 / by K. Molly O’Donnell. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022027941 (print) | LCCN 2022027942 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800737990 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800737846 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Germans—Namibia—History. | Women colonists—Namibia—History. | Immigrants—Namibia—History. | Namibia—Race relations. Classification: LCC DT1558.G46 O36 2023 (print) | LCC DT1558.G46 (ebook) | DDC 968.810043/1—dc23/eng/20220614 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022027941 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022027942

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-799-0 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-784-6 ebook

https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800737990



Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

x

List of Abbreviations

xii

Map of South West Africa

xiv

Introduction. Sponsored German Women’s Settlement in German South West Africa

1

Part I. The Origins and Biopolitics of German Women’s Settlement Chapter 1. Colonial Fanaticism

27

Chapter 2. “The Defilement of Our Daughters”

57

Chapter 3. The Race War

88

Part II. Colonial Gossip, Moral Panics, and Racial Conflict Chapter 4. The Malice of Native Women

125

Chapter 5. A Moral Danger for the Children of White Mothers

148

Chapter 6. African Stories

175

Part III. German Women’s Colonialism after the Loss of the German Colonies Chapter 7. German Colonial Women in World War I

207

Chapter 8. Weimar Women’s Colonial Activism

237

Chapter 9. German Women and the Nazi Colonial Movement

271

vi | contents

Conclusion

310

Appendix

316

Bibliography

323

Index

338



Illustrations

Map 0.1. Albert F. Calvert, South West Africa during the German Occupation (London, 1915). Public domain.

xiv

Figures 1.1. A cartoon from the satirical magazine ULK titled “Abschiedslied der nach Afrika ziehenden Mädchen, Sehr frei nach Chr. F.D. Schubart.”) (“Song of Farewell from the Maids moving to Africa, Very Freely after Ch. F.D. Schubert.”) ULK. Illustriertes Wochenblatt für Humor und Satire 28, no. 11 (17 Mar. 1899): 4. Image courtesy of the Bavarian State Library Munich, Shelf mark 2 Per. 24 k-28. Fair use.

48

1.2. Clipping of a cartoon from the satirical magazine Kladderadatsch from March 1899 titled, “Illustrierte Rückblicke vom 1. Januar bis zum 31. März.” (“Illustrated Review from 1 January to 31 March.”) Kladderadatsch (Berlin) 52, no. 13 (26 Mar. 1899), Beiblatt, 142. Image courtesy of the University of Heidelberg Library. Signatur: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.3213#0142. Fair use.

49

2.1. Colonial wedding at the Windhoek commissioner’s office ca. 1899. Seems to be a previously unknown photograph of colonialist author Helene Nitze von Falkenhausen with her groom, Baron Fritz von Falkenhausen. Governor Theodore Leutwein appears at the right of the photo in uniform, and Commander Ludwig von Estorff appears to be the other officer on the left. https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt .de/kolonialesbildarchiv/content/titleinfo/11487118 Courtesy of the Colonial Picture Archive, Goethe University Frankfurt/Main Library: urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-680029.

62

viii | illustrations

2.2. “Hinrichtung aufrührerischer Mörder in Gibeon,” (“Hangings of rebel murderers in Gibeon”) from Sam Cohen postcard collection, “Kreuz und quer durch SWA [Südwestafrika]” (“Out and About in SWA [South West Africa”]). The execution of Nama prisoners in Gibeon for killing white settlers. The image is one of many from the war showing German military forces’ summary hangings of African prisoners. https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/kolonialesbildarchiv/content/ titleinfo/11356944 Courtesy of the Colonial Picture Archive, Goethe University Frankfurt/Main Library: urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-786954.

75

3.1. “Haifischinsel: Lager der gefangenen Herero und Hottentotten: gefangene Hereros” (“Shark Island Camp for Herero and Nama Prisoners: Captive Hereros”). An image of Herero internees at the notorious Shark Island Camp for Herero and Nama Prisoners of War. https:// sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/kolonialesbildarchiv/content/ titleinfo/11278595. Courtesy of the Colonial Picture Archive, Goethe University Frankfurt/Main Library: urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-781174.

99

3.2. “Deutsch-Südwest / Windhuk. Kinderstation am Elisabethhaus / - 34” (“German Southwest [Africa]/Windhoek. Children’s Ward at the Elisabeth House—34”) Pronatalist Colonial German propaganda image, undated photo of the Children’s Ward at the Elisabeth House. https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/kolonialesbildarchiv/content/ titleinfo/11486484 Courtesy of the Colonial Picture Archive, Goethe University Frankfurt/Main Library: urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-708943.

100

5.1. Deutscher Nachwuchs” (“German Procreation”). German Kindergarten in South West Africa. Undated. https://sammlungen. ub.uni-frankfurt.de/kolonialesbildarchiv/content/titleinfo/11413324 Courtesy of the Colonial Picture Archive, Goethe University Frankfurt/ Main Library: urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-891133.

161

6.1. “Heimathaus für junge Mädeln des Frauenbundes in Keetmanshoop, 1908 (“Homeland House Dormitory for Young Maids in Keetmanshoop, 1908”). Publicity Photo of the Women’s League of the German Colonial Society. https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt .de/kolonialesbildarchiv/content/titleinfo/11484911 Courtesy of the Colonial Picture Archive, Goethe University Frankfurt/Main Library: urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-823682.

197

7.1. “Kuibis: Damenschützenverein beim Übungsschießen 1910” (“Kuibis Ladies’ Rifle Club during Shooting Practice, 1910”). https:// sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/kolonialesbildarchiv/content/ titleinfo/11359918 Courtesy of the Colonial Picture Archive, Goethe University Frankfurt/Main Library: urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-823025.

216

illustrations | ix

8.1. “Deutsche Schulkinder in Karibib [in der Mitte Frau v. Bredow]” (“German Schoolchildren in Karibib ([Women’s League Chair Frau von Bredow in the middle]”). Publicity Photo of the Women’s League of the German Colonial Society, c. 1930. https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt .de/kolonialesbildarchiv/content/titleinfo/11465289 Courtesy of the Colonial Picture Archive, Goethe University Frankfurt/Main Library: urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-756744.

250

9.1. “Pfadfinder der ‘Heiss-Flagge,’ Nationale Feier–Windhuk/S.W.A.” (“Pathfinders ‘Raise Flag’ — National Festival Windhoek, [South West Africa].” German Scouts hoist the Nazi Flag at a German Festival in Windhoek. Photo: Nora von Steinmeister, Women’s League, c. 1933. https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/kolonialesbildarchiv/content/ titleinfo/11487084 Courtesy of the Colonial Picture Archive, Goethe University Frankfurt/Main Library : urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-679736.

273

9.2. “Deutsche Kolonial–Zeitung, Deutscher Kolonialdienst, Geo, Deutsche Presse, Kolonie und Heimat.” Nazi magazine propaganda distribution for Germans in Africa: https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/ kolonialesbildarchiv/content/titleinfo/11415241 Courtesy of the Colonial Picture Archive, Goethe University Frankfurt/Main Library: urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-705841.

284

Tables A.1. White Population of South West Africa, 1897–1913.

316

A.2. Settlers Sponsored by the Colonial Society, Categorized by Relationship to Colonial Sponsor and Listed by Year of Departure from Germany, 1898–1914.

317

A.3. Records on the First Sponsored Servants, 1898–99.

318

A.4. Census Records on the Family Status of White Men in South West Africa, 1891–1913.

320

A.5. 1912 Colonial Census Records: White and Mixed-Race Children, by District.

321

A.6. Population of South West Africa, 1913–46.

321

A.7. Subsidized German Women’s Colonization to East Africa and South West Africa, 1926–36.

322



Acknowledgments

I cannot begin to thank all those who have assisted me since this project began more than thirty years ago. I conducted the main archival research in 1992–93 at the University of Bielefeld, thanks to a Fulbright fellowship. The archivists at the German Federal Archives in Potsdam and Koblenz were of invaluable help. I note that much has changed since then, and the major collections that I researched are now housed in the German Federal Archives in Berlin. I supplemented this material over many years through short visits to more than a dozen research libraries, as well as a sojourn at the National Archives of Namibia in 2008. Although many of the individuals who directly aided my work are no longer at these institutions, I thank these institutions for their kind support. In addition, Wolfram Hartmann, Werner Hillebrecht, Jake Short, and Claire Venghiattis were especially helpful in advising me on my research in Namibia. This book would not exist without the support of fellow historians who have nudged me along the way to completion. Most especially I thank Renate Bridenthal who spoke with me nearly weekly about the project over the past several years. In addition, several others helped me edit chapters and offered helpful suggestions and advice, particularly Bonnie Andersen, Amy Hackett, Marion Kaplan, and Claudia Koonz. They and the other members of the New York German Women’s History Workshop have been the most amazing comrades and supporters, and have helped immensely in improving this work, though its flaws are my responsibility: Dolores Augustine, Marion Berghahn, Rebecca Boehling, Jane Caplan, Belinda Davis, Atina Grossmann, Deborah Hertz, Maria Höhn, Young Sun Hong, Sandrine Kott, Jan Lambertz, Wendy Lower, Molly Nolan, Kathy Pence, Nancy Reagin, Julie Sneeringer, and Carli Snyder. I also want to thank my many colleagues at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey. Not only did the provost’s office provide research and travel moneys, but in addition my fellow historians, both current and retired from my department, have been a wonderful community of scholars over the years: Jason Ambroise, John Bone, Sue Bowles, Joanne Miyang Cho, Ted Cook, Yingcong Dai, Mel Edelstein, Terry Finnegan, Navyug Gill, Evelyn Gonzalez, Carol Gruber, David Koistinen, John Livingston, Dewar MacLeod, Larry Mbogoni, Scott McDonough, Lucia McMahon, Sally Nalle, Isabel Tirado, and Neici Zeller. I want to offer special thanks to George Robb who has been so encouraging of my

acknowledgments | xi

book project; Malissa Williams, for her invaluable daily assistance and bringing us all together; as well as my late friend and colleague, Ana Margarita Gómez, who was a delightful person and an admirable historian, whom I still miss daily. I must also recognize my fantastic colleagues in the William Paterson University Honors College, Dean Barbara Andrew, Jan Pinkston, West Moss and my fellow track directors, Lauren Fowler-Calisto, Mike Chao, Phil Ciofari, Bruce Diamond, Neil Kressel, Amy Learmonth, Jill Nocella, John Peterman, Joe Spagna, Marianne Sullivan, Martha Witt, and Ge Zhang. Our university is a struggling regional and minority-serving state institution, and our collective energies and efforts are focused on our students’ success. I love my work teaching, advising, and directing humanities honors student research, though it often pulls my attention from my own writings. I extend my love and gratitude to my siblings Kevin, Noreen, and Tim; to my late parents; and to my “Doktor Mutter,” although she would hate this title, the pioneering feminist German woman’s historian, Jean Quataert. Jean passed suddenly in 2021, before I could share with her the news of my forthcoming book or she could see her Festschrift which is forthcoming from Berghahn Books, thanks to the dedication of its contributors and the oversight of her Jean’s former students, Jennifer Evans and Shelley Rose. Finally, I must offer my most profound thanks to my longtime partner and spouse who has shared my life since our days as graduate students, Robert Harris, for his enduring love, help, and patience.



List of Abbreviations

BAB

Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde (German Federal Archives BerlinLichterfelde)

BDF

Bund deutscher Frauenvereine (Federation of German Women’s Organizations)

DKB

Deutsches Kolonialblatt (German Colonial Press)

DKG

Bestand der Deutsche Kolonial-Gesellschaft (Collection of the German Colonial Society)

DKZ

Deutsche Kolonialzeitung (German Colonial Newspaper)

DSWA

Collection of the Kaiserliches Gouvernement in Südwest Afrika, 1888–1915 (Imperial Government of German South West Africa, 1888–1915)

DSWAZ

Deutsche Südwestafrikanische Zeitung (German South West African Newspaper)

DK

Der Kolonialdeutsche (The Colonial German)

DVP

Deutsche Volkspartei (German People’s Party)

FK

Die Frau und die Kolonien (The Woman and the Colonies)

KH

Kolonie und Heimat (Colony and Home)

KNvKuH Kriegsnummer von Kolonie und Heimat (War issue of Colony and Home) LZ

Lüderitzbuchter Zeitung (Lüderitzbucht Newspaper)

NAN

National Archives of Namibia

NFD

Nationale Frauendienst (National Women’s Service)

NSDAP

Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German National Socialist Party)

RKA

Bestand des Reichskolonialamtes (Collection of the German Colonial Ministry)

SPD

Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (German Social Democratic Party)

list of abbreviations | xiii

Südwest

Südwest: unabhängige Zeitung für die Interessen des gesamten Schutzgebiets (Southwest: Independent Newspaper for the Interests of the Entire Protectorate)

SZ

Swakopmunder Zeitung (Swakopmund Newspaper)

VDR

Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Reichstages (Stenographic Reports of the Deliberations of the Reichstag)

WAd

Windhoek Advertiser

WA

Windhuker Anzeiger (Windhoek Advertiser)

Map 0.1. Albert F. Calvert, South West Africa during the German Occupation (London, 1915). Public domain.

 

Introduction Sponsored German Women’s Settlement in German South West Africa

[The German government in South-West Africa] reported . . . that if one were to declare marriages between white men and Rehoboth Bastard women legally permissible, then the consequence would be to recognize all the mixed-race individuals and their descendants born from white men and colored women since the declaration of German rule, and to grant them the same legal status as the Rehoboth Bastards. The Colonial Division of the Foreign Ministry in Berlin did not respond to our report. From legal concerns, particularly the different race relations in the Pacific colonies and, above all, objections in the homeland, especially in the Reichstag, the colonial division did not want to make such a fundamental decision. However, through a private letter from the worthy head of its legal department, Councilor Schmidt-Dargitz, we in Windhoek discovered with satisfaction that Berlin would grant the colonial government a free hand. In Southwest Africa news of the ban on mixed marriages spread quickly. Most whites, especially the few white women then in the territory, supported it completely. Only a few voices spoke against it, noting that until now such marriages had been tolerated, since there were not enough single white women in the land and many Rehoboth Bastard girls came close to the cultural level of whites. But the government stood firm. The building of German cultural traditions and civilization could not be founded on the marriages of German men and women of color. The marriage ban was only the first step; it must unconditionally be followed with an increase in the number of white women. Former colonial councilor Oscar Hintrager describing the origins of the 1905 interracial marriage ban in German Southwest Africa, 19411

2 | the servants of empire

Speaking during the middle of World War II, Oscar Hintrager cited the history of the interracial marriage bans in German South West Africa (hereafter South West Africa; contemporary Namibia) as relevant to contemporary Nazi theories of race. As Hintrager, a coauthor of the 1905 German colonial ban on intermarriage in South West Africa, makes clear, he and fellow administrators had designed the ban to promote enduring German hegemony in South West Africa. In the Wilhelmine period, many German settler men in Southwest Africa formed relations and sexual ties to women of various African ethnicities, particularly biracial Rehoboth Basters (an historic fusion community dating from the seventeenth century from African and Afrikaner inter-marriages in the Cape Colony). German pseudoscientists, including eugenicists, anthropologists, and racial scientists cited the community as proof of the undesirability of racial mixing.2 In addition to the ban on intermarriage, Hintrager and other colonial officials redirected and channeled the territory’s reproduction along strict racial lines by encouraging extensive sponsored German women’s settlement there between 1898 and World War II. Hintrager also acknowledged that, although the colonial administration in Germany could not support the bans directly, colonial officials in South West Africa could enforce de facto policies of racial separation, despite the likely objections from the German public, other German colonies, and antiimperialist German politicians. Colonial racial politics also drove German women’s settlement in South West Africa, even as opponents spoke out strongly against the scheme in Germany. From the turn of the twentieth century, the German state and German colonialists openly collaborated to promote German women’s settlement in South West Africa as a means of resolving the so-called Mischehenfrage (race-mixing question) in South West Africa through importing white brides to attract male German colonists away from their liaisons with African women.3 In my examination of colonial racial-reproductive relations in Germany and South West Africa, I trace the intersections over time of German attitudes toward race, class, ethnicity, gender, and nation. This study begins around 1895, during the Wilhelmine or imperial era (Kaiserreich), as Germany consolidated its colonial holdings and aimed to become a global power. Defeat in World War I put an abrupt end to these aspirations. After the German monarchy ended in 1918, a constitutional, Weimar republic governed Germany until the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. In the Weimar and Nazi eras, German colonialists seeking the restoration of the former colony resumed sponsored German women’s settlement and pronatalist initiatives in South West Africa up to World War II. This study considers the lasting impact of these efforts. How did the colonial movement in Germany and South West Africa influence German attitudes toward race and reproduction? How did German radical nationalists and Nazis influence South West African settlers? How did the long history of legal bans on intermarriage and state promotion of white pronatalism in South West Africa inform Wilhelmine, Weimar, and Nazi population and citizenship policies?

introduction | 3

The ill-conceived intent behind the female colonization program created a false expectation among many promoters of German colonialism that these sponsored white women settlers could solve what they saw as a racial crisis in the territory. In fact, the colony’s race-based reproductive policies enabled German men to escape the consequences for their sexual liaisons and rapes through legal bans on intermarriage, and stripped biracial and black individuals of their civil rights and claims to citizenship. The racial and eugenic ideas behind the organized German women’s settlement project lay at the root of German imperialist fantasies, in which Germans in the homeland imagined South West Africa as a colony populated by racially pure white families. The new female settlers complicated the tense racial and sexual relations of the territory, particularly by exposing the hypocrisy of settler men. Historians have suggested that the German colonialist movement influenced the evolution of German national and racial identities from the 1890s on, as well as intensifying anti-black prejudices in Germany over time. The growing radicalization of German racial and nationalist identities impacted the self-perceptions of German settlers in South West Africa, in turn. My research is the first to expose the full history of sponsored German women’s settlement in South West Africa. In particular, I trace how settlement efforts connected Germans in the homeland to South West Africa but also how settlers disrupted and redirected colonialist ideas. My work attributes much of the conflict and violence in South West Africa to the contradictions between the broad ideological positions of Germans in the metropole, versus German settlers’ more nuanced political engagements with class, ethnicity, gender, and race.4

The Origin of the Scheme to Recruit German Women Colonists This is the first in-depth study of sponsored German women’s settlement in South West Africa. Radical German colonialists who originated and controlled the effort to sponsor German women to South West Africa self-consciously and openly pursued a racial-reproductive agenda. They aimed to recruit brides for German male homesteaders to reorder race relations in South West Africa, unlike existing British or French private, philanthropic white women’s settlement programs in other colonies, which claimed to expand female participants’ opportunities. As this book details, most of the initial organizers and proponents of the scheme were ultranationalist German men, who were explicitly antifeminist. Though a few German feminists also advocated women’s colonization as a route for greater independence and professional advancement than in Germany, organizers refused to cooperate with them, most notably the Berlin-based moderate feminist Minna Cauer. Nor were colonialists willing to join forces with German missionary groups working in South West Africa, who offered to assist and train worthy German women to serve as moral guides for the African population. In fact, once details of the pro-

4 | the servants of empire

gram emerged, German feminists and missionaries, as well as socialist and liberal politicians voiced opposition to its selection and treatment of the sponsored servant women to South West Africa. When the public debate over the program first emerged in the late 1890s, the proposal provoked so much controversy among skeptics in Germany and in Africa that both critics and advocates alike sometimes labeled female colonization as a response to the “women’s question” in Germany. Colonialists advanced the notion of German women’s colonization as the koloniale Frauenfrage (colonial woman question), presenting it as a potential solution to German women’s inequality in Germany, yet showing little regard for actual settler women’s welfare. Still, colonial administrators and members of the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (German Colonial Society) who first championed sponsored female settlement in South West Africa inadvertently promoted a quasi-nationalist role for German women.5 At the turn of the twentieth century, the Colonial Society had few female members and displayed no interest in women’s issues. Well-connected, colonialistleaning professionals, military officers, academics, business people, and aristocrats founded the society, which amalgamated two rival predecessors in 1887. The Colonial Society was a private organization of enthusiasts who lobbied for imperial causes such as further settlement, investment, and infrastructure in the overseas German Empire. They became unlikely leaders of Germany’s active efforts to promote women’s colonization in the 1890s. At this time, the public was consumed in lively and often hostile debates over German women’s proper place in family and society, and public squabbles over the so-called colonial woman question sometimes took place within the larger context of the struggle for women’s equality at home. Among female colonialists, the influence of moderate, maternalist, feminism on female colonialism triggered an ongoing battle to secure recognition of German women as active agents of nationalism and imperialism rather than as the mere servants of male settlers, colonialist agitators, and the German state. In the Wilhelmine era, German feminists often faced sexism and misogyny from male colonialists, who resisted their ideas and influence on the colonial movement. By 1906 a German women’s colonial organization formed, and soon joined as an auxiliary of the German Colonial Society as its Frauenbund (Women’s League) to assist in the recruitment of German servant women for work in South West Africa, though tensions emerged as the male leaders of Colonial Society increasingly suspected the league of feminist tendencies.6 Before World War I German feminists failed to achieve their desired influence over the German female settlement program to South West Africa, although female colonists often found opportunity and advancement there. This work’s central narrative explores the images and experiences of German settler women in South West Africa, as women in Germany attained greater political, economic, and social equality. After World War I, radical-nationalist, maternalist feminists increasingly joined with German state and private organizations to seek the return

introduction | 5

of South West Africa, which was now a League of Nations mandate under South African administration. German women colonialists and state officials cooperated to promote race-based population policies in the mandate, in various stages up to the 1940s. In the Weimar and Nazi era, renewed settlement programs actively discouraged German women who were too self-interested or ambitious from settling in South West Africa. Organizers restricted funding to German women under the age of thirty because they sought to instrumentalize German settler women as child-bearers to serve their radical nationalist and racial reproductive aims. My research shows that, although organizers often envisioned German settler women as the servants of empire, these women did not always heed demands for their subservience. Many of the poor white female settlers who emigrated to South West Africa disrupted bourgeois race and gender relations in the territory. Paradoxically, their very presence contributed to the trenchant sexual and racial violence of the territory. It is time to consider the German settler women of South West Africa, and particularly their role in genocide, National Socialism, or Nazism, and apartheid.7

German Settler Women, Structural Genocide, and Gendered Racial Violence The biopolitical thinking behind German women’s settlement was inextricable from the German colonial racial-reproductive policies, and together, these shaped distinct eruptions of violence that unfolded in South West Africa during the era of German rule. This study draws on biopolitical theories that argue that settler colonialism induces ongoing structural genocide in which settlers erase indigenous populations over time; as settlers invade, they build their own political and economic institutions while destroying existing ones. Moreover, the politicization of race and pronatalist reproduction in settler societies goes hand-in-hand with the destruction of indigenous populations and the systemic imposition of limits on the reproduction of racialized subjects and their futurity. Scholars of other settler societies have argued that, over history, state control over white and indigenous women’s bodies has been central to the establishment of white hegemony within European settler societies.8 These theories offer a basis for interpreting historical white settlement in South West Africa as an ongoing structural genocide, from its origins through the apartheid era, unlike histories that distinguish the German wars of suppression from 1904 to 1907 against the Herero (Ovaherero) and Nama (Namaqua-speakers) as a single genocidal event. Key studies have centered on the role of the German military and top colonial officials in ordering the annihilation of the Herero and Nama in these campaigns. However, these studies neglect how German settlers contributed to the daily violence that continued to kill Africans and destroy their cultures following the wars.9 Even more significantly, my research addresses how positive eugenic policies promoting white settlers’ popu-

6 | the servants of empire

lation growth in South West Africa were intertwined with negative eugenics that systematically undermined Africans’ reproduction. A spate of scholarship also has been exploring connections between the South West African genocide and the Holocaust. I find this literature most helpful where it treats the pervasive anti-black racism and violence in South West Africa as enduring influences on Germany.10 This study adds to this growing literature on the legacies of colonialist racism by considering the influence of radical German and National Socialist ideas of eugenics, pronatalism, and racism within South West Africa, and vice versa—notably the Nazi movement’s spread of anti-Semitism in the territory. From the 1920s on, German settlers in southern Africa colluded with other whites in the subjugation of African populations and lent support to the rise of apartheid policies, in part through the influential tide of fascism throughout the region. My work also considers the German colonial movement’s support for expansion in Eastern Europe, including participation of German women from the colonies. However, I see Hitler’s foreign policy shift to Eastern European conquest as detrimental to South West African settler interests. Instead of linking South West African violence directly to the brutality of the Holocaust, I detail how German settlers’ efforts to segregate, disempower, suppress, and erase blacks predated Hitler and continued after his defeat. Historians also have made clear that notable German anthropologists and racial scientists who researched in South West Africa before World War I later influenced Nazi racial policies. In part, the German eugenic movement drew on the proven model of the German Colonial Society’s pronatalist and race-based population measures in South West Africa to call for public efforts in Germany to promote genetically sound marriages and sterilization of the genetically unfit, as well as to settle healthy Germans within overseas German communities around the world. The evidence suggests that South West African and metropolitan Germans’ racial thinking directly influenced each other, but not exclusively.11 In particular, this book highlights how Germans developed biopolitical policies in South West Africa in light of neighboring southern African colonies, though their methods sometimes diverged in key ways. German South West Africa’s imposition of formal interracial marriage bans and other strict racial reproductive policies differed somewhat in earlier timing and severity from neighboring colonies in British southern Africa. Furthermore, German South West Africa offers local variations on the patterns of racial demarcations, sexuality, and morality typical of white women’s franchise colonialism (as opposed to settler colonialism) in Asia and elsewhere. For example, unlike most European colonial territories where settler colonialism did not predominate, German officials in South West Africa strongly discouraged, and finally banned, interracial unions in the territory in 1905, subsequently establishing special racial birth registries recording biracial unions, and classifying most German men’s African and biracial wives and children legally

introduction | 7

as “natives.” Also, unlike the bourgeois origins of most white women in franchise colonial communities, most German settler women in the territory originated from the German working and peasant classes. Sponsored settler women in South West Africa in particular were often servants, many of whom were far from malleable or circumspect, challenging and disrupting the racial demarcations, sexual mores, and class pretentions of white elites in the colony. Though German women’s settlement in South West Africa failed to stem the numbers of biracial births, growing social stigmatization against racial mixing exposed the hypocrisy of colonial German men’s pretenses of racial and moral superiority. However, German settler men also expressed patriarchal anxiety over the potential for settler women’s infidelity with African men, and reacted violently to protect what they perceived as white women’s honor. These contradictions complicated German women’s encounters with Africans, especially with the servants in their homes.12

Theorizing Gossip and Rumors, Violence and BioPower Historians find colonists’ everyday beliefs difficult to document. We have limited examples of the daily rumors and gossip that settlers exchanged in South West Africa—fragments published in colonial newspapers or contained in private correspondence uncovered in the archives. I distinguish between settlers’ gossip, rumors, and moral panics, but argue they are interconnected. Gossip refers to when two or more social peers share personal information about a known third party in order to offer a judgment about him or her.13 German gossip about fellow settlers’ sexual and other transgressions were specific, intimate disclosures targeting the reputations of clearly identified, known individuals. Public gossip politicizes private matters, reinforcing cultural meanings and values within communities. In colonial settings in the early twentieth century, intimacies surrounding race and sex were highly politicized, resulting in close patriarchal control over white women, whose reputations reflected on their male family members’ prestige. When gossip spreads beyond the circle of acquaintances, it may diffuse and aggregate into rumors, which are generalizations and collective stereotypes about entire groups. Rarely, such rumors reveal a white settler community’s deepest fantasies and anxieties.14 As this study explores, the settler community’s hearsay and rumors offer evidence for a deeper understanding of the eruption of particular colonial scares and vigilantism in the territory. Though Germans often discussed rumors of black rape scares in other colonies, the most distinctive moral panics that took precedence in South West Africa fit local circumstances and social anxieties. Such panics sometimes exploded into racial violence: white settler vigilantism and police-sanctioned violence erupted in the face of these tales, and white paranoia compounded over time.15

8 | the servants of empire

White settlers’ fears were fluid; they played out in unique patterns as Africans influenced how settlers viewed and spoke about them. German settlers in South West Africa were sometimes skeptical, and even referred in racist terms to the many outlandish gossip and rumors they heard as “African stories” or, tall tales “that emerge somewhere, circulate rapidly from word of mouth from one African to another, and occasionally by whites, until they find their way to the press or officials in wildly exaggerated form.” However, such rumors were more credible to whites when they confirmed what many settlers already believed, especially during and after the Herero War and Nama War, that local Africans were engaged in a deadly but secretive existential race war against them. White settlers shared the stories that made sense in the local context and that explained both their lived experiences and their subconscious anxieties, many of which were sexual in nature. I argue that these rumors must be interpreted and understood within the logic of the German community in South West Africa. In particular, the lingering trauma of the wartime assaults on white settlers in the Herero and Nama Wars may help explain the intensity of settler paranoia and impulses toward vigilantism in South West Africa.16 Ultimately, this book underscores how intersections of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and national identity fed evolving patterns of violence in South West Africa from the 1890s to World War II. As the narrative makes clear, German settler women sometimes participated in horrific acts of colonial violence in the territory, but they also suffered the traumas of war, including African attacks on settler homesteads and South African invasion of the territory during World War I. German racial violence in the territory reached its pinnacle with the slaughter of the Herero and Nama populations in the wars of 1904 to 1907, followed by harsh German administrative policies and unsanctioned violence against the surviving Africans through the end of German rule. However, Germans instead highlighted Africans’ destruction of settler homes and their victimization and defilement of settler women and children. The Germans in South West Africa faced defeat in World War I, including mass internment, destruction, and bloodshed on all sides. South Africa assumed military control in 1915 and secured the power of League of Nations mandate administration over the territory in 1919. From the 1920s South Africa gradually expanded its apartheid policies of racial segregation and control in the territory, through state violence in the face of mass African resistance. German settlers in the mandate were complicit in supporting polices for African dispossession, disenfranchisement, and segregation, as well as strict regulation of race and reproduction under apartheid. I contend that German settlers’ anxieties over racial pollution and preserving white women’s purity provoked and justified local patterns of colonial violence in South West Africa, but I also consider, in turn, how the biopolitical rationales behind German women’s sponsored settlement influenced much broader and evolving German radical nationalist views of the state and its regulation of race and reproduction.17

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Sources and Chapter Outline This book is the result of extensive archival research in the collections of the German Colonial Society, German Colonial Division of the foreign ministry (after 1907 Colonial Ministry), and German administration in South West Africa in the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv), as well as documents in the National Archives of Namibia. These files enabled me to follow the history of German women’s settlement up to World War II. Besides the documents preserved in archives, I consulted contemporary colonialist literature and journals, especially those from the German Colonial Society and its Women’s League. These sources published in Germany gave me valuable insights into their propaganda and popular influence. South West African newspapers from the late 1890s to the 1940s offer rich information on German settler society and politics, including reports of local gossip, rumors, and violent incidents. Because the sources for the years after Germany lost the colony in 1919 through World War II are less plentiful, however, I rely for this period heavily on Women’s League’s and Reichs Kolonial-Bund (Reich Colonial League) publications, which together detail sponsored German women’s settlement. In addition, the mandate administration in South West Africa seized documents from suspected Nazi organizations, including the Women’s League, in the 1930s. These archival records detail how Nazi sympathizers within the German women’s colonial movement corresponded with and mentored German settler women, sponsoring some independent and sexually emancipated women, as well as ardent Nazis, to South West Africa. These documents directly implicate the German women’s colonialist movement in the spread of Nazi propaganda to German settlers, especially youths.18 The book proceeds chronologically, beginning with part I, which examines the controversy about German women’s settlement in South West Africa, the welfare of female settlers, and the explosion of the Herero and Nama Wars. In chapter 1, I outline the debate surrounding the first, fanatical proposal to organize women’s colonization in South West Africa and the myriad popular criticisms and anxieties that shaped the early trials of the female colonization program between 1896 and 1900. Chapter 2 details the failures and missteps that plagued the early attempts at German women’s settlement in South West Africa. Chapter 3 situates German women’s sponsored colonization within the context of the rapid settlement of the frontier in South West Africa from 1898 through the Herero and Nama Wars, from 1904 to 1907. In part II, chapters 4 through 6, I emphasize the solidification of the white settler community as revealed in gossip and moral panics in the final years of German colonial rule, from 1907 through 1914. All three chapters highlight the expansion of white settlement, intensification of colonial state control over race and reproduction, and tensions among white women employers, German domestic servants (hereafter “maids”), and black and biracial African servants. Chapter 4 outlines the

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formation of the Women’s League and the expansion of the female colonization program, along with the German South West African colonial administrations’ efforts to stem interracial unions in the wake of the colonial wars. Chapters 5 and 6 examine rumors and accusations of poisoning and rape made after 1910 against African servants in German settler homes in light of the significant social changes and tensions within the white community. Finally, part III explores the tumultuous period from World War I to the Weimar and Nazi eras. Chapter 7 traces the colonialist work of the Women’s League in Germany and South West African female colonists during World War I. Chapter 8 details the opportunities and crises facing the German colonialist movement in a postcolonial era, as the Women’s League resumed sponsored German women’s settlement in Africa. Chapter 9 follows the organization’s embrace of Nazism and gradual absorption into the Nazi state within the umbrella Reich Colonial League. A brief concluding chapter gauges the historical significance of sponsored settlement, as well as Nazi women’s colonial movement during World War II. In what follows, I offer an encapsulated history of the overseas empire, the German colonial movement, and German settlement and racial policies in South West Africa at the turn of the twentieth century as background for general readers.

Background on the German Colonial Empire The history of Germany’s late-acquired, comparatively small, and widely dispersed network of overseas colonies has seemed peripheral to scholars of the much larger and longer-lived European empires, particularly those of Great Britain and France. Elder Prussian conservative chancellor Otto von Bismarck led the drive to unify the German nation from 1864 to 1871; he had hoped to expand the new but lateformed German nation’s global power. As German chancellor, he asserted German control over territory in Africa between 1884 and 1885, though some of his motives are unclear. He indicated economic interest in obtaining raw materials and overseas markets, but perhaps also sought to distract workers from the growing socialist movement through appeals to popular colonialist fervor. He soon lost interest, remarking to one German colonialist, “Your map of Africa is very fine, but my map of Africa is here in Europe.” He made clear his diplomatic pursuit of European-centered alliances was a greater strategic priority than acquiring colonies.19 Although this and other historical studies use the term “colony,” the official German term in use, Schutzgebiet more correctly translates as protectorate because at first the lands were German zones of trade influence with military protection rather than subject to direct rule. After 1899 Germany claimed concessions in Asia, including several small Pacific islands: northeastern New Guinea, part of Samoa, the Bismarcks, Marshalls, Carolines, and Marianas (excepting Guam). The German navy even took a Chinese concession in Jiaozuo in the Shandong Peninsula

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of China (which the Germans called Kiautschou). Imperial Germany established formal control over lands without considering how to control or administer these claims or its much larger territories in Africa: Cameroon, East Africa (roughly covering the area of present-day Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi), Togo, and South West Africa (now Namibia). Long after Germany acquired colonies, ordinary Germans barely noticed these far-flung possessions.20 When Chancellor Otto von Bismarck first established the protectorate in South West Africa in 1884, the German Reich recognized trader Adolph Lüderitz’s colonial company, the Deutsche Kolonial-Gesellschaft für Süd-West Afrika (German Colonial Company for South West Africa), as the primary agent of colonial development. Bismarck sought to shift the costs of administering and defending colonial enterprises onto official colonial trading, real estate, and mining companies and similar territorial enterprises, following somewhat the model of the British East India Company. However, the policy of relying on small, private companies to administer, defend, and develop colonial lands yielded poor results. Lüderitz soon went bankrupt, forcing the German government to intervene. The German Empire awarded a handful of land concessions and mineral rights from the late 1880s and well into the 1890s to further speculative companies that hoped to discover diamonds, gold, or other valuable resources. These companies’ tax payments to the German state, however, never offset the expenses of colonial administration and defense. Although these companies set high prices on land, hoping to spur land speculation, they pursued almost no active economic development through 1896.21 From the 1830s missionaries had been active in the regions Germans claimed as their protectorate in 1884. The most prominent, the Lutheran Rhenish Missionary Society, headquartered in Barmen, Germany, established its first outpost in the future colony; by 1890 it had expanded to include eighteen mission stations. The Rhenish missionaries negotiated intertribal relations and advised the German administration in its policies with native Africans. White settlers in the colony tended to view missionaries with suspicion, since they advocated the interests of the indigenous population, however minimally. Long before the Germans’ protectorate, many local Africans were familiar with Western languages, customs, and religions through contact with Afrikaner and British traders. The Herero were a Bantu-speaking population who had migrated into southern Africa, while their rivals, the Nama, had local origins. A dominant subgroup, the Witbooi Nama, spoke Oorlam, a fusion of Khoekhoe and Dutch. Both the Nama and Herero were nomadic, with large cattle herds, which they exported through the British port at Walvis Bay and southwards across the Orange River into Cape Colony. Besides cattle, local Africans also traded with Europeans in ostrich feathers, ivory, and a small amount of copper in return for modern rifles, textiles, and other goods. Hostilities between the two dominant ethnic groups were pervasive and often played out in the area around Windhoek, where the missions provided material aid to the Herero, and early missionaries married Herero women. By contrast, Ovambo

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in the colony’s Northern territory were oriented toward Portuguese Angola and had little contact with German colonial occupiers. Several other predominantly nomadic ethnic groups displaced by the Nama and Herero over the past century also populated the territory such as the Khoekhoen and !Kung populations who traditionally foraged and hunted. They and the Damara, another traditionally nomadic and pastoralist Khoekhoe group who were clients of the Herero, also took part in colonial politics and conflicts.22 A small garrison of German protectorate forces (Schutztruppe) comprised the sole German authority in the early years of the territory, under the successive commands of two imperial commissioners: Dr. Heinrich Göring from 1885 to 1890, and Curt von François from 1890 to 1894. Ongoing hostilities between the Nama and Herero and periodic Nama guerilla attacks against German occupying forces and settlements left the territory too unstable for colonial trade or other enterprises to flourish. In 1890, as German relations with the Nama worsened, fighting increased. The commander of the German Protectorate Forces, François requested reinforcements, which grew from 21 to 216. In 1893 the German colonial administration in Berlin sent further troops and ordered him to suppress the Witbooi, following signals they might unite with the Herero to defeat the Germans. François led a small detachment of German soldiers against the main Witbooi compound in Hornkranz, massacring about one hundred, mainly women and children. However, the Witbooi leader, Hendrick Witbooi, escaped with most of his soldiers and continued to harry Windhoek in small skirmishes.23 Back in Berlin, Bismarck’s successor, Chancellor Leo von Caprivi, regarded the deteriorating security of the colony with alarm and chafed at the increasing expense of the conflict. Suspecting that François’s aggressive actions might provoke a wider war with the African population, in late 1893 Caprivi dispatched Major Theodor Leutwein to review the situation and empowered him to relieve François. As the new territorial commissioner, Leutwein arrived with further reinforcements and pursued hostilities until Witbooi sued for peace. In September 1894 Witbooi recognized German sovereignty, became its military ally, and resettled southward from Windhoek to Gibeon. In 1895 Leutwein even enlisted the Witbooi fighters as a supplement to the Protectorate Forces. The period of calm that followed was by no means the end of African resistance against the Germans, but Leutwein used the peaceful interval to consolidate German control.24 Governor Leutwein’s brief suppression of the African population encouraged more white settlers to move into South West Africa—chiefly arriving from Cape Colony including German transplants, Afrikaners, and British. The German Colonial Society had been instrumental in promoting additional settlement to date, though their numbers still remained below five hundred in 1891, when the society sent an agent to investigate possible sites for a farming community. In 1892 the organization obtained a land concession from the German Reich for a settlement syndicate, which in 1896 became a full-fledged colonial company, Siedlungsge-

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sellschaft für Deutsch-Südwest Afrika (Settlement Company for German South West Africa). By 1895 the syndicate had arranged a charter with the Woermann Shipping Line to establish a profitable regular steamship service from Hamburg to ports in Swakopmund and Lüderitzbucht, permitting more regular immigration from Germany. The Colonial Society’s sponsored female settlers benefitted from the organization’s negotiated fare reduction with the Settlement Company. The society’s discounted passage to South West Africa serves as one of many examples of how close ties with the German Imperial government benefited the society, and vice versa.25

Cooperation between the Colonial Society and German State Faced with outright opposition to the colonies from the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD (German Social Democratic Party) and massive indifference overall, the Wilhelmine state might have been forced to concede its overseas territories if not for the cooperation of these German colonial enthusiasts in the government and in the Colonial Society. These organizations propagandized overseas power (Weltmacht) among middle-class nationalists in support of a range of causes. Some of these grassroots supporters of empire no doubt emerged from the avid readers of colonial adventure tales. German colonial supporters even argued that South West Africa had the potential to attract settlers from Germany who would otherwise emigrate to rival foreign lands such as the United States. After 1895 several revitalized Wilhelmine nationalist associations expanded their mass nationalist agitation in Germany. Of these, the German Colonial Society stood as a less notable member when compared to the more radical Alldeutscher Verband (Pan German Society) and the more popular Flottenverein (Navy League). The populist nationalist movement gradually revived and refashioned German popular, romantic imperialism through ambitious schemes aimed at the development of South West Africa. The mass organizations lobbying for Germany to become a naval power amplified the clamor for colonies. In 1897 they succeeded, thereby inciting a devastating arms race with Great Britain.26 Kaiser Wilhelm II’s campaign to increase Germany’s international prestige through a more aggressive foreign policy benefited from the populist fervor. In 1894, after the aged prince Hohenlohe-Langenburg had stepped down from the presidency of the Colonial Society, his relative, elder statesman Prince Chlodwig Hohenlohe-Schillingfürst, became chancellor. Dynamic foreign minister Bernhard von Bülow stood in line to succeed him as chancellor in 1900. Despite this support in high places and considerable enthusiasm from nationalists, including from the National Liberal Party that favored overseas economic development, the SPD objected to imperialism as further capitalist expansion, while left liberals decried the expense and inefficiency of colonial administration and wars. Their opposition

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intensified from 1904 to 1907 during the Herero and Nama Wars in South West Africa as well as the 1905 to 1907 Maji Maji rebellion in German East Africa, although these wars spurred popular patriotic campaigns among the masses. The Colonial Society’s middle-class rank-and-file membership set out to recruit a mass following for overseas expansion, but few workers could afford their dues.27 The position of colonial director, which after 1907 became the independent office of the colonial minister, changed hands nine times before World War I. The German Colonial Society remained ultranationalist, and yet it hesitated to criticize the German state openly for its weakness. Herzog Johann Albert zu Mecklenburg Schwerin, who led the society from 1895 to 1920, energetically promoted German imperialism. Mecklenburg, a hereditary aristocrat who ruled over an elite executive board, dominated the Colonial Society’s agenda and often overrode suggestions from the rank and file. And yet, as the head of the Colonial Society and the director of a private German charity fund for colonial welfare, he exercised more influence than the colonial directorship. As the book also makes clear, Mecklenburg did not originally welcome the proposal to send women to South West Africa, though he wanted to prevent intermarriages between German men and African women.28

The Racial Order in South West Africa at the Turn of the Century Historians often treat the racial policies in South West Africa uniformly from the 1890s until 1915, but I emphasize how racial thinking in the colony evolved over time. By the late 1890s, many Germans in the homeland believed that the mixing of races was undesirable, and anthropologists and racial scientists had begun to argue that biracial offspring inherited the negative genetic traits of both races. Because German administrators in South West Africa treated Rehoboth Basters as part of the native, subaltern population, they also opposed intermarriages with German men because these unions contradicted their subordinate status and potentially granted German citizenship to non-whites. Local German colonial law defined all individuals with African forebears as “native,” and similarly ignored many Rehoboth Basters’ claims to Dutch and British citizenship, despite internationally recognized treaties recognizing their claims.29 In South West Africa, more than in other German colonies, officials discouraged racial mixing by developing and enforcing a set of ad hoc legal policies, notably the interracial marriage ban of 1905, which retroactively invalidated all existing interracial unions as well as forbidding new ones. Whenever possible German administrators denied access to marriage for interracial couples to prevent conferring citizenship to individuals with African heritage. Even though some biracial persons circulated socially in South West Africa as “white” and “respectable,” they counted as “native” under German law, even if they claimed Dutch or British legal protection.30

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Some German administrators, such as Keetmanshoop district officer (Bezirksamtmann) Dr. Angelo Golinelli, continued to voice the long-established toleration for interracial marriage in the region. Golinelli, an old-timer in southern Africa who later became the Colonial Ministry’s top advisor on South West Africa, insisted that there was no shortage of white or almost-white women in South West Africa and that male colonists did not want or need German women as servants or as wives because local brides of color were more suitable, less demanding of comforts, and more experienced with local languages, households, and agricultural conditions. German colonial administrators also continued to treat the Rehoboth Basters as reliable allies, despite misgivings over their supposedly unstable racial backgrounds.31 The contradictions between Rehoboth Basters’ legal and social position in South West Africa became more controversial with every passing year. German officials worried as growing numbers of Rehoboth Baster brides married male colonists. Despite officials’ efforts to prevent intermarriages, however, some German and other European men who wanted to marry women of color successfully won redress in the colony’s appeals court in Windhoek. Despite pressure to relent, Leutwein steadfastly ordered colonial district administrators to continue to deny registration of interracial unions.32 Hoping to avoid the looming legal confrontation, Leutwein began to promote the recruitment of German women settlers. A pool of white brides for unmarried German men might accomplish what the colonial legalists could not. However, not everyone agreed that these German women would be superior wives to local women. Many historians point to the controversial impact of colonialist efforts to restrict German settler men’s sexual autonomy, especially within the hypermasculine white colonial culture of South West Africa. They note that the debates over racial mixing also influenced German society’s conception of race. Grosse in particular argues that the debate demonstrates how, in Germany, eugenic principles of racial purity did not supersede white men’s fundamental sexual autonomy.33 In South West Africa, I contend that the bans cannot be understood in isolation from efforts at German women’s settlement. As the book explains, the more white families who settled in the territory, the more that community gossip and scandal impinged on German settler men’s sexual prerogatives. Placing these bans in a larger context demonstrates they are only one aspect of the larger and more significant reordering of class, ethnicity, gender, nationalism, and race in South West Africa that followed from the gradual consolidation of white settlement in the territory. This introduction has outlined many crucial events and dilemmas within the German colonialists’ radical racial reproductive policies in South West Africa. Among many themes that stand out in the work is the radicalism of the German colonialist movement, which worked in tandem with the German state over decades to enact controversial pronatalist policies in the territory through the settlement of white women as prospective brides, while enabling the systematic genocide against

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the local African population. Throughout the early twentieth century German women willingly supported male colonialists’ and state officials’ racially motivated reproductive policies in South West Africa, even when these diverted them from their own goals and interests. I allege that, although organized German women colonialist women masqueraded as apolitical, charitable clubwomen, they often aided and abetted these Weimar and Nazi state population policies in South West Africa through unacknowledged state funding for Germans in the territory. This subterfuge was necessary because South African authorities would not have permitted German state-subsidized settlement and political agitation in the mandate. Finally, German settler women were complicit in enabling and supporting the ongoing structural violence against Africans that culminated in the apartheid rule in South West Africa. In tracing the long history of white women’s sponsored settlement in South West Africa, the book expands on the existing histories of German colonialist women’s movement. Previous works fully demonstrate the assertiveness of German women as colonialist leaders, particularly in advancing and expanding women’s colonial and nationalist roles in the homeland. However, my research elaborates on how German colonial officials sought to dictate women’s settlement policies in South West Africa in pursuit of radical racial and population policies, constricting the autonomy of the German colonialist women’s movement. Within these constraints, however, the Women’s League forged powerful diasporic ties with German settler women in Africa that expanded the global reach of the German radical nationalists and Nazi movements. Furthermore, in detailing German women’s colonialist movement’s complicity in German state’s intrusions into overseas German settler households, this book broadens and complicates our understanding of German colonialist women.34

Notes 1. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are the author’s. Oscar Hintrager, “Zur Rassenfrage in den Kolonien,” Afrika-Nachrichten 22, no. 2 (Feb. 1941): 19. Clipping of the article found in the author’s papers housed in the Bundesarchiv, Koblenz. The German Federal Archives guide for Colonial history offers an overview the biography of Hintrager (1870–1960), the author of the ban, available online at https://archivfuehrer-kolonialzeit.de/index.php/hin trager-oskar-bestand?sf_culture=en (accessed Jan. 2022). See note 2 on the pejorative term, Bastard. 2. Though the name Baster has demeaning origins, modern Basters have reappropriated it as a sign of ethnic pride, Rudolph Britz, Hartmut Lang, Cornelia Limpricht, A Concise History of the Rehoboth Basters until 1990. (Windhoek: Klaus Hess Publishers, 1999), 12. Timothy Deegan, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 21, 24, and 31–32 depicts how the Griqualand Bastaards of the Cape Colony moved northward from the Central Cape around 1770 to the Trans-Orange to escape conscripted military service. There, they became wealthy and influential trade intermediaries between whites and Nama and formed their own state institutions. Some of their territory on the Western frontier was later annexed by the British, while others became

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subjects of the newly-formed colony of Southwest Africa in 1884. Helmut Bley, South West Africa under German Rule (Evanston, IL.: Northwestern University Press, 1971), 6 estimates their population at the turn of the century at between 3,000 and 4,000. The current population is around 35,000 according to Jarmila Brezinová Švihranová, “Germans and Rehoboth Basters in the German Southwest Africa” Studia Historica Gedanensia 8 (2017), 42–58 (p. 46). The term means “cross-bred” in Afrikaans but also “illegitimate.” German commentators often misapplied their name as Bastard to underline the illegitimacy of all biracial individuals in Southwest Africa, as I retain by italicizing the term in source quotations. Please note that throughout the work I refer to the indigenous population of the colony interchangeably as Africa, black, and native. 3. The first to draw this connection between white women’s settlement and racial policies overtly was Richard V. Pierard, “The Transportation of White Women to German South West Africa, 1898–1914,” Race 12 (1971): 317–22. Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), esp. chaps. 3 and 4, conceives of distinct male and female debates over race mixing and the so-called colonial woman question in Wilhelmine Germany, which women engaged in as a means of expanding their colonialist activism. Likewise, Ute Planert, Antifeminismus im Kaiserreich. Diskurs, soziale Formation und politische Mentalität (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1998), 232–33 cited the colonization program’s role as part of the growing antifeminism and the politicization of German women’s reproduction in the Wilhelmine era. By contrast Pascal Grosse, Kolonialismus, Eugenik und bürgerliche Geselleschaft in Deutschland, 1850–1918 (Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 2000), suggests the failure of female emigration and legal hindrances to resolve the race mixing in the colonies led the eugenic movement in Germany to a new and more intense discourse on the meaning of masculine sexuality in preserving the reproduction of the German nation within its ethnic boundaries. Birthe Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten: Das Kaiserreich im Spiegel seiner Kolonien (Cologne: Bohlau Verlag, 2003) explores the controversy over law and race in Germany and its colonies. Other key works include Fatima El-Tayeb, Schwartze Deutsche: Der Diskurs um “Rasse” und nationale Identität 1890–1933 (Frankfurt: Campus, 2001); Cornelia Essner, “‘Wo Rauch ist, da ist auch Feuer’: Zu den Ansätzen eines Rassenrechts für die deutschen Kolonien,” in Rassendiskriminierung, Kolonialpolitik und ethnisch-nationale Identität (Münster: LIT, 1992): 145–60; Cornelia Essner, “Zwischen Vernunft und Gefühl. Die Reichstagsdebatten von 1912 um koloniale ‘Rassenmischehe’ und ‘Sexualität,’” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 45, no. 6 (1997): 503–19. Lora Wildenthal, “Race, Gender and Citizenship in the German Colonial Empire,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 263–83, offers an overview of citizenship policies in South West Africa, allowing comparison with Ann L. Stoler’s chapter in Tensions of Empire on the policies in the French and Dutch colonies, “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Southeast Asia,” 198–237. 4. Many recent studies have explored related questions about German colonialism, radical nationalism, gender, and race, including Tina Campt, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 39–49 on colonialist influences on German racial attitudes; Claire Venghiattis, “Mobilizing for Nation and Empire: A History of the German Women’s Colonial Organization, 1896–1936” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2005) and Wildenthal, German Women provide overviews of the German women’s colonial movement and the Women’s League, and their engagements with race and national identity. Karin Boge-Smidt, “‘Germania führt die deutsche Frau nach Südwest’: Auswanderung, Leben und soziale Konflikte deutscher Frauen in der ehemaligen Kolonie Deutsch-Südwestafrika, 1884–1920” (PhD diss., University of Magdeburg, 1995) reviews the history of German women and racial policies in South West Africa through 1914. A classic study of German colonial publications, Martha Mamozai,

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Herrenmenschen: Frauen im deutschen Kolonialismus (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1982) examines the relationship between German and black women in the colonies; Nancy R. Reagin, Sweeping the German Nation: Domesticity and National Identity in Germany, 1870–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007) chapter 2 discusses domesticity as well reproduction as essential to German ethnic and racial identity in the colonies. 5. This is the first book to focus on the German women’s colonial settlement initiatives. Some of the best known accounts of German women’s colonization and its importance in Germany are found in Roger Chickering, “‘Casting Their Gaze More Broadly’: Women’s Patriotic Activism in Imperial Germany,” Past and Present 118 (Feb. 1988): 156–85; Anette Dietrich, Weiße Weiblichkeiten: Konstruktionen von “Rasse” und Geschlecht in deutschen Kolonialismus (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2007); Venghiattis, “Mobilizing”; Katharina Walgenbach, “Die weiße Frau als Trägerin deutscher Kultur”: Koloniale Diskurse über Geschlecht, “Rasse” und Klasse im Kaiserreich (Frankfurt: Campus, 2005); Lora Wildenthal, “Colonizers and Citizens: Bourgeois Women and the Woman Question in the German Colonial Movement, 1886–1914” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1994); Wildenthal, German Women; Wildenthal “‘She Is the Victor’: Bourgeois Women, Nationalist Identities and the Ideal of the Independent Woman Farmer in German South West Africa,” in Society, Culture and the State in Germany, 1870–1930, ed. Geoff Eley (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 371–95. See also my dissertation for detailed statistical and archival material about the prewar female settlement in South West Africa: Krista E. O’Donnell, “The Colonial Woman Question: Gender, National Identity and Empire in the German Colonial Society Female Emigration Program, 1898–1914” (PhD diss., Binghamton University, 1996). See table 2 in the appendix for specifics on this group, which was nearly 2,200 by 1914 and more than 461 after 1926. Tallies for South West Africa do not include a much smaller number of German women subsidized as colonizers to various overseas territories from China and the Pacific to Cameroon, Togo, and East Africa, among other German imperial territories that fall outside the scope of this work. Livia Loosen, Deutsche Frauen in den Südsee-Kolonien des Kaiserreichs: Alltag und Beziehungen zur indigenen Bevölkerung, 1884–1919 (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2014) offers a useful overview of German women in the Pacific Islands. On the British and French colonial settlement movements, see Julia Bush, Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 2000); and my recent article: Krista E. O’Donnell, “French and German Women’s Colonial Settlement Movements, 1896–1904,” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 40, no. 1 (2014): 92–110. 6. On the Colonial Society, see Richard V. Pierard, “The German Colonial Society, 1882–1914,” (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1964). More recently, John Philip Short, Magic Lantern Empire: Reflections on Colonialism and Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012) explores the popular colonial movement in the Wilhelmine era. On the Colonial Society’s position vis-à-vis other nationalist organization in general, see especially the classic works of Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German. A Cultural Study of the PanGerman League (London and Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1984); and Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980). On maternalism in moderate, middle-class, German feminism, see Ann Taylor Allen Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, 1890–1970 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 34; and Wildenthal, German Women, 145. 7. The Colonial Society also imposed this age limit in 1914. Venghiattis, “Mobilizing,” chap. 7; Britta Schilling, “‘Deutsche Frauen! Euch und Eure Kinder geht es an!’: Deutsche Frauen als Aktivistinnen für die koloniale Idee,” in Frauen in den Deutschen Kolonien ed. Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst and Mechthild Leutner (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2009), 70–80, discuss the Weimar state-funded German women’s settlement program. Excellent works on settler violence underplay German women’s participation and influence: Martin Eberhardt, Zwischen Nationalsozialismus und Apartheid: Die deutsche Bevölkerungsgruppe Südwestafrikas, 1915–1965 (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2007) suggests long continuities

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as Germans in the territory contributed to the rise of National Socialism and apartheid there. Most influential of works on the extensive violence of the territory have been: Jürgen Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft über Afrikaner: Staatlicher Machtanspruch und Wirklichkeit im kolonial Namibia (Hamburg: LIT, 2001); and Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller, eds., Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika. Der Kolonialkrieg (1904–1908) in Namibia und seine Folgen (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2003) provide a detailed account of officials’ and colonists’ violence. A popular history David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism (London: Faber & Faber, 2011) has spread awareness of linkages between the German colonies and National Socialism. The many works of Robert J. Gordon, especially The Bushman Myth. The Making of a Namibian Underclass (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992) document male German settlers’ pattern of genocidal violence against Africans, highlighting atrocities against Khoekhoen and !Kung.. The excellent Gesine Krüger, Kriegsbewältigung und Geschichtsbewußtsein. Realität, Deutung und Verarbeitung des deutschen Kolonialkriegs in Namibia 1904 bis 1907 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999); and Gesine Krüger, “Bestien und Opfer: Frauen im Kolonialkrieg,” in Zimmerer and Zeller, Völkermord, 142–59, offer a detailed account of Herero women, and compare their roles to the roles of German women in the conflict. 8. Patrick Wolf, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Studies 8, no. 4 (Dec. 2006): 387–209; Scott Lauria Morgensen, “Theorising Gender, Sexuality and Settler Colonialism: An Introduction,” Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 2 (2012): 2–22; Penelope Edmonds and Jane Carey, “Australian Settler Colonialism over the Long Nineteenth Century,” in The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism, ed. Edward Cavenaugh and Lorenzo Veracini (London: Taylor and Francis, 2017), 371–89. Eva Bischoff, “‘Heimischwerden Deutscher Art und Sitte’: Power, Gender, and Diaspora in the Colonial Contest,” Itinerario 37, no. 1 (2013): 43–58 connects German biopolitics through the settlement of German women in the South West African case to the German diasporic movement as a whole, to critique Veracini’s formulation of a triad of colonial power in British settler colonies, between metropole, settlers, and indigenous populations, and to argue for the colonial movement’s global and transnational ideological impact. 9. George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) attributes colonial violence to German administrators’ ethnographic understandings of indigenous populations. Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005) treats the German forces’ atrocities in the 1904 native wars as the result of extremist German military culture rather than as colonialism or virulent German racism. A scholar who frames the German violence in South West Africa as a settler genocide is Elisa von Joeden-Forgey. Her “Women and the Herero Genocide,” in Women and Genocide: Surivors, Victims, Perpetrators, ed. Elissa Bémporad and Joyce W. Warren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 36–57 argues that at the point of General Lothar von Trotha’s extermination order in 1904 against the Herero, German military policies did not distinguish between the killing of men and women, but after the kaiser rescinded the extermination order, the genocide reverted to a “gender-selective type, in which men and boys of battle age are killed outright, and women and children subjected to sexualized violence and genocide by attrition” (51–52). 10. The debate over the comparative violence between the colony and other empires already began during the era in question, from the Blue Book on the subject, British Foreign Office, Report on the Natives of Southwest-Africa and their Treatment by Germany (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1918). This work served as part of a British and South African propaganda campaign to establish both German colonists and officials as brutal and unfit colonial overlords and to deny Germany the restoration of the territory after World War I. In the wake of the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt

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11.

12.

13.

14.

Brace Jovanovich, 1973) posited that the imperialist character established links between the racist history of European colonialism and the evolution of totalitarianism. Her arguments have weighed heavily on the historiography of South West Africa, as for example in Helmut Bley, South-West Africa, 282 and more recently in Pascal Grosse, “What Does German Colonialism Have to Do with National Socialism? A Conceptual Framework,” in Germany’s Colonial Pasts, ed. Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz, and Lora Wildenthal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 115–34. A number of further works investigate the connections between colonialism and Nazism, such as Shelley Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (New York: Cambridge, 2011) and various essays in Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama, German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). Historian Birthe Kundrus critiques approaching Nazi expansionism in the East as a form of imperialism, “Colonialism, Imperialism, National Socialism: How Imperial Was the Third Reich?” in German Colonialism in a Global Age, ed. Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). The review article, Uta Poiger, “Imperialism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Germany,” History and Memory 17, no. 1–2 (2005): 117–43, challenges historians to think more flexibly, “If imperialism has any potential as a broad paradigm in German history, it needs to encompass periods of formal as well as informal German empires.” (118). Grosse, Kolonialismus, Eugenik, 168–76,186–90, on Philalethes Kuhn and Eugen Fischer. Kuhn’s tract, “Die Zukunft unserer Rasse,” Öffentliche Gesundheitspflege 6 (1921): 414–15, a transcript of his speech delivered at the meeting of the Deutschen Vereins des öffentliche Gesundheitspflege (German Association for Public Health Care) in Nüremburg, Sept. 1921 calls for the spread of colonial pronatalist policies to Germany; Kuhn details the significance of German women’s colonial settlement in South West Africa as a successful case study of eugenics in “Eheforderung und Rassenhygiene in den Kolonien,” Öffentliche Gesundheitspflege 4 (1919): 152–57. Shelley Baranowski, Nazi Empire, 191–92, acknowledges the colonial influence on German eugenics but argues that Nazi race policies did not evolve from these precedents alone. Wildenthal, “Race, Gender, and Citizenship”; Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten, 223–50; Ann L. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and Ann L. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995) suggest that transgressing bourgeois morality in colonial communities spurred racial conflict and violence, but racialized and sexualized conflicts in South West Africa followed local dynamics. On the German memetic policies of South Africa, see both Ulrike Linder, “German Colonialism and the British Neighbor in Afrika before 1914: Self-Definitions, Lines of Demarcation and Cooperation,” in German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar German, ed. Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011): 254–72; and Birthe Kundrus, “German Colonialisms: Some Reflections on Reassessments, Specificities, and Constellations,” 36, in Langbehn and Salama, German Colonialism. Definition from Jörg Bergmann, Discreet Indiscretions: The Social Organization of Gossip (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1994), 49. Max Gluckman, “Papers in Honor of Melville J. Herskovits: Gossip and Scandal,” Current Anthropology 4, no. 3 (1963): 307–16 depicts how gossip escalates to scandal when it attempts to lower the social position of an individual in the eyes of the community (p. 12). Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000), 59, argues somewhat differently that gossip and rumor are somewhat overlapping terms, but she defines “rumor” as “events analyzed and commented upon” (58). Most importantly, however, she indicates an escalation and broadening that seems to build rumors from gossip: “Rumors, more than gossip, move between ideas about the personal and the political, the local and the national.” (62). Regarding white settler fan-

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tasies and anxieties, Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 11, and 55; and on the historical impact of gossip, Kathleen A. Feeley and Jennifer Frost, “Introduction,” in When Private Talk Goes Public: Gossip in American History, ed. Kathleen A. Feeley and Jennifer Frost, 10–12 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 15. John K. Noyes, “Geschlechter, Mobilität und der Kulturtransfer: Lene Hasses Roman Raggy’s Fahrt nach Südwest” in Phantasiereiche: zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus, ed. Berthe Kundrus (Frankfurt: Campus, 2003), 220–39. Jill Suzanne Smith, “A Female Old Shatterhand? Colonial Heroes and Heroines in Lydia Höpker’s Tales of South West Africa,” Women in German Yearbook 19, no. 1 (2003): 141–58, remarks on gossip’s role in exerting settler community social discipline against white women. Scholars of colonial racial violence in German South West Africa from Helmut Bley onward have underscored the causative role of white paranoia in eruptions of conflict. In the postwar era, Robert Gordon and fellow contributors remark on this theme repeatedly in Namibia under South African Rule: Mobility & Containment 1915–46, ed. Patricia Hayes, Jeremy Silvester, Marion Wallace, and Wolfram Hartmann (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998); Mattia Fumani explores the treatment of a white woman for paranoia in “‘A German Whore and No Money at That’: Insanity and the Moral and Political Economies of German South West Africa,” Cultural Med Psychiatry 44, no. 3 (2020): 382–403. See also my article: Krista O’Donnell, “Poisonous Women: Sexual Danger, Illicit Violence, and Domestic Work in German Southern Africa, 1904–1915,” Journal of Women’s History, 11, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 32–54; and K. Molly O’Donnell, “The Public Danger of Rumor-Mongering: News in German Colonial South West Africa during the First World War,” Journal of Namibian Studies: History Politics Culture, 19: 69–89. 16. Former captain and company commander in South West Africa, Oberst a. D. Willeke, “Am Okawango,” quoted in Willy Bolsinger und Hans Rauschnabel, eds. Jambo watu! Das Kolonialbuch der Deutschen (Stuttgart: Verlag Christoph Steffen, 1926), 139, defining the term “African story.” Jeremy Krikler, “Social Neurosis and Hysterical Pre-Cognition in South Africa: A Case-Study and Reflections,” Journal of Social History 28, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 491–520 argues that Afrikaners’ racial trauma of the Boer War of 1899–1902 gave rise to a spate of paranoid rumors of African insurrections in 1904; Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft, 161–67 examines “hysterical” settler rumors in Gibeon of a Berseba Nama insurrection in 1909. 17. On the mandate in the 1920s and 1930s, see Marcia Wallace with John Kinahan, A History of Namibia, From the Beginning to 1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 213–36. Key studies of the intersections of German race, class, ethnicity, gender, and national identities within the colonial movement include Dietrich, Weiße Weiblichkeiten and Marcia Klotz, “Memoirs from a German Colony: What Do White Women Want?” in Eroticism and Containment: Notes from the Floodplain, ed. Carol Siegel and Ann Kibbey (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 154–87. Marcia Klotz, “Memoirs from a German Colony,” describes contemporary German women authors’ individual relations to gender, race, and colonial violence. They draw from broader research on white women as signifiers of race, ethnicity, and nationalism. Specific to German colonialism, see Katharina Walgenbach, “Die weiße Frau als Trägerin deutscher Kultur:” Koloniale Diskurse über Geschlecht, “Rasse” und Klasse im Kaiserreich (Frankfurt: Campus, 2005).” Walgenbach, “Die weiße Frau,” 138–40, describes German women in the colonialist movement’s colonial maternalism to explore middle-class German women’s empowerment through colonialism and racism. Dietrich, Weiße Weiblichkeiten, 378–80, discusses the significance of colonialist German women for the construction of German notions of white racial purity and power and the growing influence of racially focused reproduction. Dietrich and many others have noted the influence of colonialism within the German campaign against French occupation troops’ alleged rapes of German women in the Rhineland after World War I, in which Germans worked through the traumas and humiliation of defeat (Dietrich, Weiße Weiblichkeiten, 363). Similarly, Iris Wigger, The “Black Horror” on the Rhine: Intersections of Race, Nation, Gender and Class in 1920s Ger-

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18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

many (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) 30–32 and 325–30, highlights the international power of the campaign for popularizing of racism, as well as its impact in solidifying German ethnic and national unity across class lines. National Archives of Namibia (NAN), A.221 90, Private Accessions: Confiscated Documents of the Frauenbund der Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, 1934–39. Lynn Abrams, Bismarck and the German Empire, 1871–1918, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006), 4, 20–22. Quotation, 21. Woodruff Smith’s classic work The German Colonial Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978) provides an excellent general history of German colonialism; see esp. 108–15. Smith, German Colonial Empire, 55–56, 159. Bley, South-West Africa, xvxi–xxii; Wildenthal, German Women, 86–87; Alan Barnard, Hunters and Herders of Southern Africa: A Comparative Ethnography of the Khoisan Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 4–12; Steinmetz, Devil’s Handwriting, 7. J.H. Esterhuyse, South West Africa, 1880–1894 (Capetown: C. Struik, 1968). Readers can also refer to excellent general backgrounds in Bley, South-West Africa and Smith, German Colonial Empire. For relations between Africans in the territory, many of these earlier works depend on the contested writings and opinions of missionary and scholar H. Vedder’s South West Africa in Early Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938). I refer to Namibia’s traditional foraging populations of Khoekhoen and !Kung, in preference to the ethnographic terms Khoi San or Bushmen. Steinmetz, Devil’s Handwriting, 151; Wilifried Westphfal, Geschichte der Deutschen Kolonien (Munich: C. Bertelsmann, 1984), 157–68; Udo Kaulich, Die Geschichte der ehemaligen Kolonie Deutsch-Südwestafrika, (1884–1914) (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2003), 86–88. Dr. Heinrich Göring was the father of notorious Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring. Westphal, Geschichte der Deutschen Kolonien, 157–68; and Bley, South-West Africa, 4, list biographical particulars for Leutwein (1849–1921), who was commissioner for South West Africa after 1894 and appointed as governor in 1898, as the colony’s administration was transformed from its military standing to a civil government. Refer to his autobiography for more details: Theodor Leutwein, Elf Jahre als Gouverneur in Deutsch-Südwestafrika (Berlin: E.S. Mittler, 1906). Pierard, “German Colonial Society,” 154–57. The white population is detailed in the appendix, table A.1. Smith, German Colonial Empire, 40–47; Daniel Walther, Creating Germans Abroad: Cultural Policies and Identity in Namibia (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2002), 9–17. Pierard, “German Colonial Society,” 106, 161–62. Smith, German Colonial Empire, 40–47. Duke Johann Albrecht zu Mecklenburg Schwerin (1857–1920) was a younger son of the grand duke of Mecklenburg. President of the Colonial Society from 1895–1920, the duke was well-traveled and fiercely nationalistic. His activities were not restricted to the Colonial Society, and he eventually became an avid member of both the Pan Germans and the Navy League. He served in the German military, rising to the rank of cavalry general before his retirement. He also held several prominent political roles, twice serving as regent of Brunswick; he achieved perhaps his greatest notoriety as the honorary head of the infamous radical nationalist party, the Deutsche Vaterlandspartei (German Fatherland Party). Pierard, “German Colonial Society,” 165–67, outlines his background. Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten, 219–23, 234–50. Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten, 244, on the ban’s purpose in delegitimizing biracial children; Woodruff Smith, “Colonialism and the Culture of Respectability,” in Ames, Klotz, and Wildenthal, Germany’s Colonial Pasts, 15. BAB, South African Microfilm Collection of the records of the German Southwest African colonial administration, Signatur R 151. (Collection name abbreviated as DSWA), file L.II.k.1, Bd. 1, [stamped pagination], 11, Colonial Government circular, dated 28 Feb. 1898.

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On Golinelli’s background see Bley, South-West Africa, 69, fn. 157. See also the article on his career in DSWAZ, 12, no. 92 (16 Nov. 1910). Steinmetz, Devil’s Handwriting, 225–30, describes the evolution of German ethnographic writings about the Rehoboth Basters. 32. One such case resulted in an 1897 legal ruling in favor of a plaintiff ’s right to intermarriage. Marriage guidelines are spelled out in the document DSWA, F.IV.r.1, Bd. 1, 11–12 from colonial director Paul Kayser, on behalf of the chancellor, Berlin, 24 Sept. 1893 to Colonial Commissioner Curt von François, Windhoek. and (17), Leutwein on his current policy of forbidding state registry for intermarriage even before the 1905 ban, 23 Aug. 1898. Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten, 241–42. 33. Grosse, Kolonialismus, Eugenik, 192; Wildenthal, German Women, 86–107; Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten, 221. 34. Boge-Smidt, “Germania”; Katharina Walgenbach, “Die weiße Frau; Wildenthal, German Women; Venghiattis, “Mobilizing.”

 Part I

The Origins and Biopolitics of German Women’s Settlement

  CHAPTER 1

Colonial Fanaticism

Franz, Prince von Arenberg, stood before the Reichstag in 1899 as a vice president of the Colonial Society and the German Center Party’s spokesperson on colonial issues to assert that the mixing of races between German settler men and African women in South West Africa represented a crisis: “[South West Africa] faces a great danger from the emergence of a so-called mixed race—a Bastard race as it is called there. There is nothing worse, especially for so young and until now sparsely populated colony than this, namely the mixture of a European with a native race.”1 In response, he urged the members of the Reichstag and the Wilhelmine public to support an unprecedented state measure of funding mass German women’s colonization. As this chapter outlines, Arenberg was far from the only German colonial enthusiast who identified race mixing in South West Africa as a great danger at the turn of the century, or who promoted white women’s settlement as its solution. Arenberg elaborated far more about the supposed dangers of an illegitimate “bastard” race forming in the colony than he did about his proposal to fund German women’s colonization. Although his logical fallacy in suggesting white women’s colonization by itself could deter German settler men from sexual contact with African women did not bear close scrutiny, his remarks on race were even more outrageous. For example, his disturbing allegation that South West Africa was “sparsely populated” counted only the small, white settler population, ignoring the thousands of Africans inhabiting the territory—a particularly disturbing view in light of the German genocide in the colony.2 In contrast to Arenberg’s views, many historical accounts indicate that most German settlers in South West Africa were accepting of racial mixing at this time, nor were anthropological theories of biological racism common yet in Germany. Because the Reichstag debate of 1899 suddenly focused the German public on racial thinking about the colonies, the debate deserves more scholarly attention in its own right.3 In fact, as this chapter details, Arenberg’s speech introducing the measure in the Reichstag represented the culmination of three years of efforts by the political lobbying organization, the German Colonial Society, and the German

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colonial administration to establish direct Reichstag funding for German women to colonize South West Africa. The scheme was intended to sponsor white male settlers’ female relatives, wives, and fiancées to the territory, as well as unmarried German maids to work in settlers’ households until their marriage. The Colonial Society and state officials combined efforts for the scheme to promote German women as wives and mothers in South West Africa to rescue the colony from its imagined racial decline. The unlikely plan’s supporters included some of the most powerful men in the German colonial movement: including influential thinkers and missionaries, as well as top officials in the German colonial division in Berlin, the German chancellor, and, allegedly, even Kaiser Wilhelm II. However, the program quickly generated criticism from multiple fronts. Indeed, the 1899 proposal before the Reichstag resulted in humiliating public defeat, causing profound embarrassment for its supporters. Prince Franz von Arenberg’s political reputation as a staunch colonialist, a staid Catholic, and a prominent social and political conservative from the Center Party with close personal ties to the kaiser was not the only one to suffer. In his speech, Arenberg declared that moral principles demanded the German nation’s support for an effort to end unmarried relations between settler men and African women in South West Africa, but critics within the Reichstag denied the requested state funding for the travel costs and dowries for these prospective brides. In rebuttal, Reichstag critics also dismissed the proposed women’s settlement program as the unhappy product of “fanaticism for colonial politics.” August Bebel, a well-known socialist feminist and the head of the SPD, which stood firmly against the German overseas empire, even joked that the fantastic venture belonged “more or less in cloud cuckoo land.”4 Historians note that the SPD (subsequently joined by critics from the Center Party) formed a successful German political opposition in the Reichstag until the end of Wilhelmine era, continually stymieing so-called fanatical efforts to apply racial and eugenic policies to German families in the colonies.5 Though these critics won a victory in the Reichstag, and the media coverage of the debate even lent support to German feminists seeking to expand women’s colonial activism, ultimately the story of this showdown reveals a less optimistic view: Bebel and his fellow detractors of the measure greeted the “especially interesting” proposal with ribaldry and ridicule on the Reichstag floor, but they did not focus their attack on Arenberg’s assertions of the undesirability of “racial mixing” or his allegations of its dangerous social and political consequences for the development of South West Africa as the primary German settler colony. The bald racism of Arenberg’s speech deserved its censure: in labeling the colony’s growing biracial population as a great danger, he negated their African mothers altogether. He suggested these women would abandon or degrade their infants from German fathers: “These children then commonly would have the flaws of both races, and, added to this would be an absence of the absolutely indispensable upbringing by the mother, so these defects in their disposition would be compounded through

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very meaningful mistakes in childrearing.”6 His remarks reveal his assumption that German mothers served as a source of character and virtue that African women lacked. Instead of decrying these claims, Bebel and his fellow critics focused on the impracticality and unfairness of the contractual arrangements for the participating migrant German maids, and objected to the unseemliness of the German colonial administration serving as a public employment and marriage bureau. They opposed the German state’s designs to interfere in private population matters and to marshal German women for colonial marriages and reproductive services, claiming these exposed the scheme’s dangerous political fanaticism.7 So, although Bebel and his contemporaries’ public criticism may have temporarily halted funding from the Wilhelmine state for German women’s colonization in Africa, political opposition did not kill the program, which subsequently went forward though private funding. The so-called colonial fanatics lost in the public debate before the Reichstag in a humiliating fashion, yet they ultimately succeeded in promoting extremist racial and sexual ideological assumptions that denigrated all Germans with African ancestry, and pursued race-based, eugenic population policies through private moneys. By examining the origins of these German women’s settlement efforts in South West Africa and the events leading to the emigration of the first group of subsidized settler women in late 1898, the following narrative probes the reasons for the 1899 Reichstag failure, as well as considering the wider significance of the measure.

Origins of the Scheme As described in this book’s introduction, the proposal to sponsor German women’s colonization in South West Africa emerged unexpectedly in 1896. The contemporary context was crucial within this discussion for three reasons: first, the middle-class women’s movement was taking hold in Germany and garnering mass support through the formation of a national, mainstream organization, the Bund deutscher Frauenvereine (Federation of German Women’s Organizations), in 1895; second, the German colonial administration in South West Africa pursued greater German settlement of the territory by offering homestead land to veterans of the German protectorate forces after concluding a peace treaty with Herero leaders in 1895; third, popular German colonialism and nationalism surged as avid visitors flocked to the Colonial Hall in the Berlin Universal Exhibition of 1896. Despite the upswing, popular colonialism faced major hurdles as a result of the heightened publicity and the racial and sexual anxieties the movement provoked. For example, German girls’ and women’s unseemly interest in African men’s performances at the Colonial Exhibition subsequently resulted in a ban on the admission of ethnic show performers to Germany. Meanwhile, Deputy August Bebel exposed the scandalous corruption, violence, and sexual license of Carl Peters in

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German colonial East Africa in March 1896 before the Reichstag at the annual colonial budget hearing. The Peters imbroglio, in particular, raised colonial leaders’ anxieties over German men’s moral conduct in the colonies. South West African governor Leutwein as well as local German missionary leaders corresponded with the German colonial director and chancellor in deploring white settler men’s “concubinage” with black and biracial women in South West Africa. As the South West African Barmer Missionsgesellschaft (Barmen Missionary Society) Inspector August Schreiber remarked, “If there could be expected that European girls could be provided for the [German settler] men, it would put the matter completely in order.” Unsurprisingly, proposals to sponsor German women’s colonization quickly followed—suddenly cropping up at the Colonial Society annual board meeting in May 1896 in Berlin, on the eve of the colonial exhibit’s opening, and during a heated argument over whether to transport German criminals to South West Africa to boost its white population.8 The prisoner exchange proposal aimed to jump-start the development of the territory by deporting prisoners from German lock-ups to build needed public infrastructure such as dams for the settlements in South West Africa. In 1897 the Reichstag indeed was weighing the establishment of such a penal colony. The British and French practice of transporting criminals to their overseas colonies to provide labor to growing settlements and to become settlers themselves upon their release had been popular since previous eras of settler colonialism in the 1700s and early 1800s, but the British ended convict transport to Australia in 1868. British and French transports of poor, female orphans and convicts from their respective metropoles to Australia and New Caledonia as brides for freed male convicts were also gradually ending.9 Speaking against the German implementation of similar measures in South West Africa, Arenberg did not oppose prisoner transports to South West Africa outright, but remarked that conditions were not yet favorable there because the arid colony lacked sufficient water reserves for extensive agriculture. The German Colonial Society had formed its own land company in South West Africa, the Settlement Company for South West Africa, establishing a modest garden colony on crown concession land in Klein Windhoek in 1892, but arid conditions challenged horticulture there. Many of the white settler men in the territory, including immigrant Afrikaners from neighboring areas of southern Africa as well as many newly arrived German men, established smallholdings in the territory. Many supplemented their incomes through handwork as carpenters, leatherworkers, or mechanics, or as oxen transport drivers, in order to meet the initial capital expenses of digging for water, construction, and breeding livestock. Veterans of the German colonial protectorate forces were the largest settlement group, since they became eligible for generous homesteader concessions from German crown lands after their discharge.10

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Opponents of penal colonization within the German Colonial Society such as the national governing committee member and pastor, Ernst Albert Fabarius of Koblenz, decried the very principle of populating Germany’s only settler colony with convicts. Fabarius was a theologian with broad academic interests in economics, political science, and colonialism, as well as moral reform advocate who, in conjunction with his friends and fellow colonialists Mission Inspector Schreiber and Geologist Max Busse of Koblenz, founded the Deutsche Kolonialschule (German Colonial School) for male students in 1895, which Fabarius directed after it opened its doors in 1899 in Witzenhausen, Hesse. In 1908 he established its sister institution, the first Deutsche Kolonial-Frauenschule (German Women’s Colonial School), alongside it. A student of the prominent German radical colonialist, racist, and anti-Semite Heinrich von Treitschke, Fabarius embraced a brand of colonialism that proclaimed that successful German overseas development depended on the hard work, capability, and morality of the colonizers, views that led him toward establishing a school for Christian-nationalist colonial education for youths in agriculture, business, and trade. He deplored the majority of colonial administrators and settlers as inept, adventurous, dissolute, and self-serving German men (perhaps thinking of Carl Peters). He also habitually published tracts on his own pet projects, including antifeminist proposals to resolve the woman question in Germany, as well as his objections to prisoner transportations to the German overseas possessions.11 In Fabarius essay against prisoner transport to the German colonies, he warned, “Deportation hinders the unique development, cultivation and Christianization of the natives in the deportation areas, and makes it impossible, it causes the greatest physical, moral and social damage to the native population.” In Fabarius’s subsequent speech at the national Colonial Society meeting, he also obliquely raised a concern that German criminals might engage in immorality and vice through their sexual unions with African women, which his colleague and fellow Colonial Society delegate from Koblenz, Dr. Max Busse, underscored. Busse, a doctor of geology and a mine inspector, shared ties with Fabarius in the Protestant antislavery and missionary movement. Like Fabarius, Busse remarked that the Germans who eventually settled South West Africa should serve as moral examples to the resident Africans, and so urged the Colonial Society instead to fund the emigration of unmarried German women to the territory as the ideal representatives of Christian morals. Together, Arenberg, Busse, and Fabarius shared the view that moral and cultural uplift of colonial subjects was the primary mission of German colonization, notions that served as guiding principles in French and other European colonial regimes, but that some historians argue were largely was absent from German colonialism.12 In outlining his views of settler colonization, Busse depicted German women as innately moral and capable housekeepers, naturally drawn to marriage and moth-

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erhood, and therefore a valuable group of potential colonizers who were superior to African wives: It is known that in Southwest Africa, the Europeans have already had numerous marriages with the natives and from these mixed marriages, the Bastard population has arisen. The relatively high number of German men and the annual discharge of enlisted men from the colonial troops, many of whom remain in [South West Africa], and the shortage of white women creates the equal danger that they will marry blacks. Here in Germany, there is a surplus of the female element. How many of the girls who remain unmarried would marry if they were offered the opportunity! . . . Shouldn’t it be possible for the Colonial Society to lend its support to this branch of practical colonization? Many a strong peasant girl and also many a capable city girl certainly would go with joy to Southwest Africa to fulfill her calling there, if she had sufficient assistance to give her the possibility to do so.13 In his remarks, Busse asserted that unmarried women in Germany outnumbered men, and the colonization by what he called a surplus of single women in the German metropole would reduce the alleged danger of former German colonial soldiers marrying black or biracial women. Busse’s claim that many single women in German would welcome the opportunity to settle overseas drew on the rhetoric of similar European female colonization efforts operating since the 1860s. The term “surplus women” alluded to a widely held view in Western Europe that population ratios between unmarried men and women were unbalanced because young men favored emigration, producing unnaturally large cohorts of unmarried women who supposedly could not find husbands. Social critics argued that these unmarried women disrupted society, as they required suitable work to support themselves, and pressed their demands for education, careers, and other women’s rights. Antifeminists imagined that, if these disgruntled European women found husbands overseas, they would no longer organize for feminist reform. By the 1890s, British, German, and French demographers and eugenicists also increasingly viewed their respective nations’ unmarried women as a loss to their countries’ reproductive potential and population strength. They championed assisting unmarried European women to emigrate to settler societies, where white men outnumbered white women, as a means of advancing the biological strength of their empires through overseas family formation.14 In keeping with other European female colonization schemes, Busse enlisted German missionaries in South West Africa to provide housing and training for prospective German settler women. Inspector August Schreiber of the Barmen Mission arranged for local Protestant missions to accept prospective female settlers to acclimate through work and study for at least six months. In return for providing for their lodging, participants would perform labor in support of the

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missions until they married, to become model Christian housewives for German settler men.15 Busse’s ideas coincide with his friend Fabarius’s antifeminist proposals that all unmarried German women should devote a year of national service to study and perform housework that would prepare them as wives and mothers. In this case, however, the German missions in South West Africa would train German women as colonial housewives to serve as capable domestics and moral examples to Africans. The scheme envisioned white women’s settlement along the shared European logics of race, morality, and civilizing missions of other colonial powers.16 However, the leaderships of the German colonial administration in South West Africa and German Colonial Society regarded German women’s colonialization primarily through their value as productive and reproductive labor, rather than for cultural or civilizing roles, as discussed below.

The Colonial Society’s Reluctant Participation Prior to Busse’s overtures the German Colonial Society, the society had shown little interest in sponsoring German women as potential colonists at all. The Colonial Society strongly supported women’s colonial nursing through the Deutscher Frauenverein für das Krankenpflege in den Kolonien (Women’s Association for Nursing in the Colonies), which had emerged in the 1880s as part of the German confessional, cultural, moral, and nationalist movement for middle-class German women to provide nursing care overseas. The Women’s Association for Nursing in the Colonies operated through placing small numbers of unmarried German women nurses in medical service within German stations and field hospitals throughout the German overseas empire. They were connected to the German war nursing organization, the Vaterländische Frauenverein (Patriotic Women’s Society), known for its female members’ staunchly patriotic performance of maternalist national service.17 The German Colonial Society’s national executive committee recognized the practical need for nurses to provide medical care in the German colonies, yet dismissed Busse’s proposals for establishing further unmarried women’s colonization as impractical. The Colonial Society’s autocratic president Mecklenburg made elaborate and skeptical inquiries to the German colonial administration about the chances of success for women’s settlement; he asked whether veterans of the colonial protectorate forces truly wished for the emigration of prospective brides. If they could afford to marry and establish households, or would such early marriages hinder their economic progress as homesteaders? Would it not be better to wait to promote women’s colonization for a few more years until living conditions were more established in the region? In answer to his queries, the Colonial Division’s official response to the Colonial Society was also less than enthusiastic, remarking that retiring members of the colonial troops had been eligible since 1892 for a sub-

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sidy of 350–600 marks to transport their fiancées to the colony, which had rarely been requested.18 Mecklenburg’s largely economic reservations against early marriage among German male settlers closely aligned with the expert opinions of Franz Joseph von Bülow, a recent returnee from employment with a land concession company in South West Africa and author of a book on conditions there. Bülow claimed that unions between German men and African women were inadvisable racially, economically, and morally, except in a few cases where German colonists lacking means entered legal marriages with Rehoboth Baster women in exchange for their dowries of cattle and land. Bülow also argued the poverty of German male settlers resulted in their inability to establish households outfitted appropriately for German wives, who had higher living standards than Rehoboth Baster and other African women.19 Likewise, the conservative legal scholar Professor Felix Friedrich Bruck opposed mass German women’s colonization (as well as criminal deportations) in the Conservative Party’s flagship outlet, the Neue preußischer Zeitung (New Prussian Newspaper) in December 1897. Bruck favored state-sponsored settlement of men from German peasant families willing to establish garden holdings and ranches. He recommended recruiting impoverished sons of farmers destined to become factory laborers and future members of the socialist working-classes to serve as colonists in South West Africa: “From apathetic, dissatisfied and unpatriotic proletarians, we will make work-glad, happy men with patriotic sensibilities.” Bruck added that the proposal would eliminate the need to sponsor numbers of German women since, “Naturally then, these peasants will bring their wives from the homeland to German Southwest Africa with them, and so the ticklish woman question will no longer pose any difficulties.”20 Mecklenburg followed the same lines as political and economic conservatives like Bruck and von Bülow in their skepticism of largescale German women’s colonization, given the rudimentary level of development in South West Africa. However, they opposed interracial unions in Africa as well. By contrast, South West Africa’s colonial governor, Theodor Leutwein, was more optimistic about German women’s colonization. When Mecklenburg’s inquiries concerning the feasibility of such a scheme reached Leutwein, he was eager to affirm how much the colony and, in particular, its settler men would benefit from immediate German women’s immigration. He urged the Colonial Society and its supporters to recruit a cadre of unmarried German women bound for the colony to accompany the next party of missionaries due to arrive later that year. In addition, Leutwein enthusiastically confirmed to the German chancellor that he welcomed the Colonial Society’s efforts to promote German women’s settlement as brides for veterans of the colonial forces as “an important step forward in the development of the colony.”21 In light of the governor’s wholehearted approval for the project and eagerness to instigate a trial case, in January 1897 the Colonial Society’s executive committee voted to take further steps once a test subject could be found;

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specifically the test subject was to be a willing male South West African settler’s request for passage of his bride in Germany to South West Africa. The Tägliche Rundschau (Daily Review), a radical, populist-nationalist Berlin newspaper, criticized the launching of a single experimental trial as an unnecessary delay: “Due to the strong increase of male settlers, the lack of German women is so great that a Bastard-generation is to be feared . . . but waiting for a specific ‘concrete case’ seems inappropriate—something must happen sooner.”22 The populist far right in Germany now publicized the urgency and dangers of race conditions in South West Africa through a news campaign that conveniently promoted German racial awareness by expressing horror at German men’s degeneration in the colonies through intermarriage. While conservative colonialists like Mecklenburg counseled caution and patience, these hardliners demanded immediate efforts toward German women’s colonization. The Colonial Society’s defensiveness against the Daily Review’s admonishment demonstrates the deciding position of the German national press played in the subsequent German debate over sponsored women’s colonization. Histories of German news readership have concluded that, by the turn of the century, Germans of all classes were regular readers of newspapers, especially urban tabloids. No doubt, many Germans would have been aware of the increasing news coverage of the proposal to promote German women’s colonization after 1896. Although the Colonial Society published a defense against the Daily Review’s criticism in its periodical, Deutsche Kolonialzeitung (German Colonial Newspaper), which was circulated to the rank-and-file membership, the colonial movement had no popular publicity outlet to reach beyond its modest national membership of about thirty thousand at the turn of the century.23 Radical grassroots nationalists in Wilhelmine Germany, including members of populist patriotic organizations like the Navy League or Pan-German League that promoted racialized and anti-Semitic nationalism and sought to radicalize German foreign policy in this period, were the most typical readers of the Daily Review.24 Although the Colonial Society held close ties to the German conservative party structure and state bureaucracy, the radical press’s depiction of the so-called woman question in the colony as a racial emergency helped push both the Colonial Society and the German colonial division of the foreign ministry toward direct action. The Colonial Society’s advocacy of settler colonialism had been and remained among its most popular positions with the German masses and the organization strongly supported measures to increase settlement. Radical nationalists’ elevation of German women’s colonization in South West Africa to a national racial emergency also helps establish why Bebel and others charged the movement’s supporters with fanaticism. Despite the supposed urgency of German women’s settlement, until one or more German brides came forward as applicants to the Colonial Society for travel subsidies to South West Africa, Mecklenburg and the Colonial Society’s national

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board insisted that nothing more could be done. In March 1897 German Colonial Society’s general assembly rejected an alliance with German missionaries to shelter and chaperone prospective German settler women. Nor did the society approach the Women’s Association for Nursing in the Colonies for such assistance, although a small facility housing two nurses existed in Windhoek. The association publicly voiced sympathy with the goal to encourage German women’s colonization toward preventing “the lowering of European culture in the colonies through marriage with natives,” although the group made no overtures to promote German women’s colonization in general.25 The Colonial Society’s full national assembly voted on a proposal to address the “Colonial Woman Question in South West Africa” at the Colonial Society’s general meeting in May 1897. The assembly finally approved colonization subsidies for female dependents of German settlers in South West Africa and granted President Mecklenburg sole discretionary power to approve German women and children of settler men for travel subsidies through case-by-case applications. The assembly further appointed the Colonial Society officials from the national office to liaise with the Colonial Division and Governor Leutwein in coordinating the Colonial Society’s travel and housing arrangements, bypassing Busse and Fabarius. The Colonial Society’s executive vice president next declined all further overtures from German missionaries in the project and also explicitly rejected the possibility of establishing a new organization to spearhead the women’s colonization effort.26 The Colonial Society’s deliberate and complete exclusion of other parties in its scheme (apart from German colonial administrators) marked a key departure from British and French women’s colonization programs, which typically forged broad cooperation between interested men and women missionaries, colonialists, philanthropists, and even feminists.27

Theoretical vs. Practical Approaches to the Colonial Woman Question Only a few months later the deputy governor of South West Africa, Friedrich von Lindequist, concerned over continued inaction in Germany, took matters into his own hands. He noted that “until now, theoretical discussions of the Woman Question in Southwest Africa in the German press and associations have accomplished very little of practical use.” So, Lindequist initiated his own confidential circular to the various district in the territory seeking prominent settler families’ support throughout South West Africa for solving the “woman question” through German women’s settlement. In his communiqué, he deplored the growing number of German settler men’s interracial marriages and liaisons with African women in the protectorate, and argued that arranging unmarried German women’s colonization would discourage such unions. He called on settlers to hire unmarried German

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maids for their homes. When his circular returned in October, Lindequist forwarded the favorable responses to the German chancellor in Berlin, including a list of current settler households supporting the scheme and those willing to host migrant German maids. One of these so-called respectable settler families who agreed to take a white maid, the Heinemanns, were a racially mixed couple. Lindequist’s selective polling of prominent families in the settler community points to his awareness that efforts to recruit groups of unattached German women for colonization also might provoke controversy among the wider white settler community in South West Africa, who were more accepting of interracial unions.28 Meanwhile, his superior, Governor Theodor Leutwein, who was on leave in Germany in late 1897 through early 1898, lectured at public German colonial events, fueling German outrage at the alleged moral and cultural dangers of racial mixing in South West Africa. In his remarks, and later in his memoirs, Leutwein quotes from Busse’s writings extensively in advocating the emigration of more German women as necessary to prevent racial mixing in the colony and cultural degradation among male German settlers—citing historical precedent and the failures of other colonies as cautionary tales for Germany’s future colonial rule. His remarks stress eugenic theories of race and race mixing: It is a known fact that in mixed marriages between whites and coloreds the children inherit the bad characteristics of their parents in greater measure than the good. These facts have been made sharply evident through the mestizos in the Americas, and the Mischlings of East Africa and confirmed as well by the Bastards in Southwest Africa, who while they stand decidedly higher than the Hottentotts [derogatory term], Nama, and Bushmen, remain far beneath the value of their Germanic ancestors. And the marriages, which have taken place recently under the eyes of the missionaries between whites and Bastard or Hottentott girls have produced no better result. Instead of the wife and progeny rising to the level of cultivation of the white man and father, the husband sinks down to that of the wife. His house will not be a site of German character or family life, instead, he declines and more or less degrades in his hovel.29 Colonialist propaganda increasingly blurred biological racism, including the negative hereditary traits that he claimed Africans inherited, with claims of the cultural inferiority of blacks, such as the degradation that German men experienced through intermarriage with them. Germans sometimes pejoratively referred to this process of cultural decline as Verkafferung (kaffirization, a word similar to the English phrase “going native,” and so devolving to the level of civilization of Africans). Leutwein’s inflammatory German public speaking tour and the attendant press attention spread German public awareness of interracial unions in South West Africa, raised private monetary donations for ship passages and a dowry collection

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for prospective German women’s colonization, and began to spark inquiries from eager potential applicants. Still, Leutwein’s agitation had little immediate effect in pressuring the Colonial Society or German bureaucracy to begin the selection of candidates. Indeed, Leutwein wrote to his deputy in frustration that “numerous girls who are eager to emigrate are contacting me here, but without the willingness of the Colonial Society, I can do nothing with them, while the Colonial Division [of the foreign ministry] will not directly involve itself for obvious reasons.”30 Leutwein’s remarks reveal that he and Lindequist had become the prime movers behind the proposal for organized female emigration through their direct, racial appeals to the German public. After receiving the results of Lindequist’s confidential questionnaire in December of 1897, however, the Colonial Society remarked that, until individual written applications from specific German families for maids were at hand, the society’s assembly could take no further action in sanctioning a settlement scheme for them. In response, Lindequist and Leutwein painted an ominous picture of the colony’s racial future without more rapid intervention. As subsequent chapters detail, Lindequist’s personal engagement in the “colonial woman question,” as he termed it, remained a fixture of his career as he grew to political prominence in the German colonial administration. Lindequist envisioned a cooperative effort between the colonial bureaucracy, the German Colonial Society, and the colonial missions to combat race mixing in South West Africa. But his scheme also sought to instrumentalize German women for these overtly political purposes—most especially the establishment of proper white settler households to promote German population, identity, and culture in South West Africa. His confidential circular asserted the need for direct state underwriting for German women’s colonization: “The [woman] question is, in my opinion, of such eminent importance for the development of Germanness in our young colony that the state should not hesitate to contribute a corresponding sum, if private funds do not suffice.”31 From 1897 forward, Lindequist argued that the German state must promote German women’s colonization for biopolitical reasons—both to prevent racial mixing, as well as to strengthen and maintain overseas settler populations’ Germanness against rival colonial powers.32 Lindequist’s remarks revealed his pragmatic understanding about how to avoid possible public controversy in the small, white settler community of South West Africa over recruiting German women as potential brides for the territory: “To send German women out only to marry, to throw them, more or less, like marriage goods on the Southwest-African market is not practicable, because it would be demeaning to the female sex. The colonial government could not carry out such a plan for general reasons, including the vice laws [sittenpolizeilichen Gründen]. The only possible solution appears to be securing positions for well-recommended girls in families in the territory as household assistants (housekeepers, housemaids). Then they would have the opportunity to marry for their own good.”33 Here, Lind-

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equist reveals that his true purpose for German women’s colonization was never in doubt: marriage and reproduction, though his employment scheme served as a respectable cover for these prospective German brides, whom authorities might otherwise mistake for prostitutes. According to Lindequist’s blueprint, German women interested in colonizing South West Africa must be prepared to perform menial, low-paid maids’ work in German homes and so earn their keep before marriage. His proposal hinged only on finding respectable German settler homes in South West Africa willing to employ and chaperone the young women and inculcate them with local standards of German housekeeping. Lindequist offered a bare-bones proposal toward establishing basic, but respectable, employment for German servant women in South West African settler homesteads—until they found husbands.

Feminist and Missionary Counter-Proposals Leutwein’s publicity campaign in Germany to promote white women’s settlement in South West Africa sparked eager interest among many German feminists, who welcomed his idea to provide new female employment opportunities overseas. Instead of positions as lowly servants, however, German feminist journalist M. Klammt boldly suggested efforts to train them for better-paid and more-varied work. She even requested the German colonial administration build a dormitory for newly arrived German women in South West Africa, to house and offer instruction toward more-demanding and better-paid careers for them in the colony. Klammt offered to form a committee of women to oversee the project and envisioned the foundation of a German women’s school and dormitory in South West Africa with spaces for fifty women to prepare women for future careers in agriculture, nursing, and kindergartens in the colony, supported by German state subsidies and a national lottery.34 In reviewing Klammt’s proposed scheme, Lindequist remarked skeptically about the respectability of the scheme and its participants, “[T]he annual shipment of fifty marriage-hungry women exceeds the initial need, and also the men may shy away from marrying girls out of a sort of marriage barracks.” He rejected establishing the proposed dormitory in South West Africa for women as too costly, and he further doubted that its matrons could safeguard female immigrants’ reputations as effectively as individual German settler families could. Though he felt that German women employed in the colony who then could earn a cash dowry might offer stronger enticement for German men versus African women with established livestock herds, he also emphasized the need to select the participant maids carefully, and preemptively exclude “dubious individuals.”35 Such blatant state intervention in tacitly private issues like marriage, household employment, and reproduction was not yet widely accepted in Germany.36 Still,

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the Colonial Society demonstrated reluctance to grant missionary organizations or other women’s clubs a voice in their allocation of resources to prospective German women colonists. High travel costs also prevented German missionaries from pursuing their own programs; for example, the Evangelical Missionary Society’s Berlin Mission Superintendent Merensky entreated the public, particularly German women, to collect funds for his own proposed female colonization scheme. He emphasized that offering missionary supervision was necessary for ensuring the high moral character of prospective female colonists, although he feared the project would cost at least 500 marks per participant.37 (The sum reflected the high price of a second-class steamship ticket to South West Africa.) Though Merensky hoped to provide respectable care for participants in South West Africa through philanthropic support from their German sisters back home, his appeals apparently failed to generate the necessary funds. Likewise, liberal feminist Minna Cauer, of the feminist Berlin Verein Frauenwohl (Berlin Women’s Welfare Association), published, in the feminist magazine, Die Frauenbewegung (The Women’s Movement) in the spring of 1898, an offer to assist in the proposed female colonization scheme. Cauer was a leader among the middle-class branch of feminism, unconnected to the SPD’s feminist movement. Cauer called for the establishment of a separate women’s organization for the project, claiming that she and other progressive German feminists “would be willing to cooperate in resolving such an important issue, provided that their efforts did not only address the marriage question, but also the solution of cultural matters in the colonies.” Although her goals are not fully clear, her organization drew up plans to promote German women’s settlement in South West Africa that were openly modeled on the activities of the British Women’s Emigration Association, which promoted the colonization of poor women of middle-class origins, but Leutwein quickly rebuffed her.38 Instead, he declared the colonial woman question in South West Africa off limits to German feminists: “The so-called ‘woman question’ may have a great core of justification in the old Fatherland, with its excess of women. But to carry it to the colonies, with its influential female minority, where the woman as wife, and only as this, is sought after and treasured, can only harm the women themselves. This carries with it the danger that the men there will become marriage-shy and will do just what we wish to prevent, namely join themselves with native women, who don’t make such demands.” Leutwein’s refusal to confer with the feminist activists who were eager to engage in the issue of women’s colonization later rebounded against him, when Reichstag critics of female colonization depicted him as unchivalrous and misogynist, both in his treatment of potential female organizers and, by extension, the participant women bound for South West Africa.39 By excluding Cauer and other middle-class feminists as allies, however, the program’s organizers also were free to recruit simple German servant women, a very different type of female colonist than the refined ladies that most Germans

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imagined as the ideal mothers of the nation. In stark contrast, the Women’s Association for Nursing in the Colonies accepted only graduates from schools for young ladies for overseas assignments, emphasizing their middle-class origins, strong morality, and patriotism: “The care of our young colonies requires an especially solid character, a strongly developed sense of duty, and the strongest power of self-denial, as is made clear to every applicant from the outset. The colonies are a trying field for work, where desire for adventure has no place.”40 Through such images conservative, patriotic, and moral German clubwomen channeled a vision of national women’s philanthropic service to the colonies that mirrored their own identities. In Leutwein’s view, the ideal female colonist for South West Africa came from humbler social origins and was better suited toward the simplicity of frontier life, where she could become a white settler man’s housewife and bear the next generation of white settlers. Indeed, Leutwein contended from the very beginning of his involvement in promoting German women’s colonization that choosing white women suited to the hardships of settler life was crucial to the program’s success. Leutwein depicted the ideal class background of female colonists as maids and daughters of skilled tradesmen from Germany: “If the current situation continues, we risk finding that we no longer possess a German colony, but an ‘Afrikaner colony’ (Boers and Bastards). . . . Only the German family, that is, the German woman, can prevent this danger, and certainly less so the woman of ‘society’ than the working woman, i.e., simple burgher and artisans’ daughters and maids.”41 Leutwein and the other organizers dismissed the proposals of feminists who considered the colonial woman question to be a workable solution for expanding employment opportunities for genteel German women. Still, Cauer did not give up—through at least in 1907 she continued to advocate for sponsored female colonization efforts to offer professional positions for middle-class German women in South West Africa. Her publicity efforts from 1898 on encouraged other German feminists as well to envision a much broader sphere of colonialist activism for German women, beyond the narrow confines of reproductive work.42 However, they exerted little influence within the established colonial movement, as subsequent events made clear.

Exploitative Employment Contracts The Colonial Society and Leutwein’s administration, by restricting their proposed women’s colonization program to ordinary maids rather than aspiring German women from more cultured backgrounds, consciously recruited cheap and undemanding women’s servant labor for South West Africa. Once the Colonial Society had set its plans to provide subsidized fares for a trial shipload of maids in November 1898, they began negotiating contractual employment terms with the

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governor’s office in South West Africa. Local settler families forwarded written offers of employment, proposing very low wages, heavy workloads, and few workers’ rights. Potential colonial employers stipulated the maids must have spotless reputations. They must also cook well, wash, iron, and garden. The selected servants would have to give six months’ notice before breaking their contracts to marry. In three successive drafts of the program’s contracts with sponsored maids, which the Colonial Society officials, colonial administrators, and settlers in South West Africa negotiated in the spring and summer of 1898, the employment deteriorated markedly. In the first draft, Lindequist initially proposed that servants receive from 40–50 marks monthly salary, a one-year contract, and 300 marks bonus after three years’ service.43 The second draft of the contract lowered the pay range to only 20–30 marks per month. This lower salary scale still would have been typical for a servant in Berlin, Hamburg, or Munich after the turn of the century.44 However, impartial observers later claimed these wages were paltry for South West Africa, particularly in view of the greater manual work required of household servants in the colony and the much higher prices there. The low pay rates actually appear to have undercut African servant men’ salaries, which German critics later charged was evidence of its exploitative nature. German settlers, as prospective employers, also cited the supposed inexperience of the women with local conditions of housework as well as the probability of their quick marriages as pretexts for demanding these poor terms. Perhaps organizers assumed that the unfavorable conditions would motivate participant maids to marry even faster. When the Colonial Society finalized the third draft of the maids’ contract in August 1898, the maids committed to complete any labor demanded of them, even the lowliest labor, including heavy field labor, if necessary, with a minimum monthly salary of 20 marks and absolutely no scheduled raises or premiums stipulated. Adding insult to injury, the Colonial Society even refused to guarantee the return passages for any women who fulfilled their contracts without settling permanently in South West Africa, although participating servants realistically could not save sufficient funds to afford the ship fare themselves. In the Reichstag, Bebel later pointed out that German male contract laborers customarily enjoyed such provisions while working overseas.45 President Mecklenburg stated bluntly to Governor Leutwein that he would pay for return fares if a woman became “an intolerable plague for the colony.”46 Mecklenburg’s words indicate his callous personal attitude toward the potential female colonists. As the individual who controlled the Colonial Society’s funding for female colonization, its president exercised a great deal of influence over the future direction of the women’s settlement program, and he consistently ignored participants’ welfare in favor of saving money. The contract’s harsh provisions are the product of a negotiating process in which state officials, colonial settlers, and even the Colonial Society failed to advocate for the interests of the applicant servants. The contract’s terms expose the misogynist at-

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titudes of the plans’ organizers, who did not regard these women as prospective workers, but rather just convenient breeding stock for the colonies.

The Selection Process After a few successful trials arranging test cases in which German colonists applied for and received assistance to transport their wives, fiancées, and dependents, the national leadership of the Colonial Society was ready to begin selecting maids for the first group transport to South West Africa. Press coverage had been so extensive that hundreds of applicants had contacted the Colonial Society, and there was a host of prospective maids to choose from. The organizers required a great deal of the initial twelve finalists that they selected for positions in the colony in August 1898. The society’s Berlin office staff, who made the choices, looked for single, Protestant (unless otherwise specified by the prospective employer), German women with some experience in agriculture, country life, and domestic work. The women had to be younger than thirty, and provide excellent references, a photograph, a certificate of good health, and the written permission of their parents. Even women who were no longer minors had to supply evidence that their parents or guardians approved their decision.47 In choosing so carefully from the many potential applicants, the Colonial Society staff checked references meticulously and might have had such stringent requirements to counter any lingering public doubts about the respectability of their operations. The Colonial Society’s officials also made careful prearrangements to shelter the first group of emigrant maids in transit, even securing for them second-class cabins, rather than the third-class open steerage on the middle deck normally assigned to servants. Organizers rejected many applicants as “too old, too weak, unaccustomed to heavy labor, imperfect in their moral conduct, too demanding, or otherwise unsuited to the conditions set.”48 Eventually the Colonial Society had narrowed the search to a dozen healthy, hard-working, reputable maids, who were also to be “as pleasant as possible in appearance and not too old.” They departed in late November, and an official under Leutwein in South West Africa greeted them upon their arrival. Windhoek newspaper reports announced their arrival with great fanfare, and the women soon took up their contractual domestic service. (See appendix, table 3, for a listing of the first employment assignments.) By March 1899, slightly more than three months after the women landed, one was already married and six more were engaged. Eager to capitalize on the openings these unions created, Leutwein already had a new roster of available servant positions by this time, and he emphasized that the replacements were required soon. He declared the first trial a thorough success, though he mentioned that the initial group’s self-esteem and expectations of others were too high. He advised even more stringent selection and an end to the

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indulgent treatment and second-class travel accommodations that he claimed had lent the maids too much self-importance.49

Criticisms of the Program Until the first group of women departed for South West Africa, the image of the colonization program remained in the hands of a few select organizers. Suddenly, the accompanying newspaper fanfare surrounding the first shipment of women exposed the details of the maids’ contract conditions to the wider public. The independent, liberal democratic newspaper Dresdener Neueste Nachrichten (Dresden’s Latest News) published them in their entirety in November 1898, just as the first group of subsidized maids departed for South West Africa. The Colonial Society chapter in Dresden wrote the Berlin leadership, outraged upon learning the poor terms of these servants’ contracts.50 A former missionary in southern Africa, Pastor Regler, exposed the contracts’ flaws in an essay, “How German ‘Good Housewives’ Are Hired for South West Africa.” In the essay he charged that the Colonial Society was secretly luring ignorant German maids into its emigration program with false promises of future marriage, thereby forcing them into a contract “that it would be no dishonor to call an introduction to modern slavery.” The pastor elaborated that a salary of 20 marks per month could hardly be considered a salary at all in Africa: “No kaffir [a disparaging term for Africans] would work for the wages offered to these women.”51 Regler further presents the German domestics who by this time already had arrived in South West Africa as helpless innocents, unsuited to the harsh physical demands of colonial labor and the dubious moral climate of the colony. He depicted the Colonial Society’s program as an evil plot to betray the trust of innocent girls. Through the term “slavery,” the text obliquely invokes the popular image of “white slavery,” a contemporary term that described the international trafficking of white women. Newspapers throughout Europe warned prospective emigrants against procurers who lured unwary women into prostitution through the guise of legitimate overseas employment. South Africa was a notorious destination for Central European traffickers of women, whom German tabloids stereotypically depicted as Jewish men preying on innocent German girls eager to emigrate overseas. European feminists and human rights advocates targeted the trafficking of white women to overseas colonies through images of innocent white virgins’ racial defilement.52 Further allegations hinting at the dangers for these women’s racial and sexual degradation followed soon after, when the German colonial administration sought direct Reichstag funding to subsidize the colonization of additional German women in South West Africa. The 1899 German colonial budget contained a direct allocation request for 25,000 marks to fund additional women’s colonization to South West Africa

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through the Colonial Society, with a portion to be set aside to provide dowries to future emigrant maids. The budget requisition suddenly brought the program and its contract under closer public scrutiny. In fact, the proposal met trouble while still in the parliamentary budget commission. There, Bebel spoke strongly against the contract’s terms and particularly decried its failure to provide return fares at the conclusion of the women’s contracts, which male contract laborers normally received. Deputies from other parties soon conceded this last point. With considerable embarrassment, German colonial director Dr. Gerhard von Buchka finally was forced to withdraw his support for the expenditure, which the budget commission then rejected. The doomed budget item next came under lengthy discussion in the full Reichstag, where it failed amid heckling and ridicule. The many German newspapers that regularly carried Reichstag transcripts and commentary remarked on the proposal either in the budget commission or in the full Reichstag hearing.53 The independent Münchner Freier Presse (Munich Free Press) depicted the controversy as humorous, “but still having its serious side.” The reporter counted among the “funnier moments,” when Deputy Arenberg asserted that Governor Leutwein would just not be adjudicating servant employment disputes, but rather conducting marriage ceremonies for the maids. The journalist also found amusing Konservativ Partei (Conservative Party) Deputy Count Berndt von Arnim’s charge that Bebel could not provoke any other scandal, so he had to “chase after” the women who had emigrated in November.54 The unusual topic apparently afforded politicians the opportunity for a number of these suggestive jibes, providing titillating reading for the German public. The humor reveals the discomfiture of the Wilhelmine public with the scheme itself. The earnest Reichstag proponents of the measure found the ribaldry of the hearings disconcerting, promising contractual revisions to guarantee female migrants’ security in every way, particularly with regard to their return passages.55 But Bebel also chided Leutwein for his rebuffs of German clubwomen, such as Cauer and others, who rightly had sought to involve themselves in the structuring of the women’s colonization program and the negotiation of its contract. He also further condemned the proposed role of the German colonial administration in supervising the employment provisions and decried the governor’s part in securing such unfavorable terms for these maids. Bebel laid out each of the contract conditions in detail, painting a damning picture of their stringency and the government’s role in enforcing them. He then came to the conclusion that the German state should play no part in the scheme: “If the girls do not please their employers . . . then they will be in the position of pure slaves. Either they must hold out in the unpleasant servant relationship, or . . . I do not need to say what profession such a girl will be forced to take up to earn her living. I contend that since such possible results are not even very unlikely, the colonial administration and the [German] government must decline to mix themselves in this matter.56 Bebel’s statement affirmed that the German state’s involvement with such likely sexual impropriety was out of bounds.

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He also complained that the German state had no business serving as these women’s marriage and employment brokers through promoting their colonization. In response to Bebel’s attack, von Arnim vainly attempted to defend the proposed subsidy, amid much derision and laughter from the left of the house. He presented the Colonial Society’s work as a “private undertaking—although of course not a completely private matter” to which the colonial governor merely had offered his assistance.57 His feeble excuses failed to soothe the opposition: the state appropriation for the venture seemed to cross the commonly accepted boundary between private and public realms, offending widespread notions of the state’s limitations, which were revealed clearly in the controversy. Dr. Hermann Müller, deputy of the German Progressive People’s Party (Deutsche Freisinnige Volkspartei), incensed by this weak attempt at conciliation, attacked the sexual impropriety of the servant settlement program itself: “It appears to me to be impermissible to intermingle a service relationship with a sexual relationship. . . . The source of the intolerable problems with this monstrous contract lies in its merging of breeding and financial interests.” He then deplored the program as “little more than white slavery.”58 The broader German public seems to have made this same leap through the vague connections between exploitation, female emigration, race, and reproduction. The overlapping improprieties of sponsored female colonization—its stringent contract, bureaucratic involvement in the servant arrangements, its conveyance of “pure” white women to the “dark continent,” and especially officials’ aims in promoting German maids’ marriage and motherhood—disallowed the German state’s direct participation or funding. Supporters tried to couch the plan in the vocabulary of patriotic philanthropy by depicting their scheme’s advantages for its participants and the German community in South West Africa alike. They exaggerated the great care and attentive measures of organizers, missionaries, and civil servants for the participating maids, despite their outright rejection of offers from missionaries and female clubwomen to assist in chaperoning and mentoring the maids. In complete reversal of the opinions that they had previously expressed, Reichstag spokespersons for the female colonization scheme hypocritically invoked the sorely needed cultural contributions of German womanhood in the colony, and heralded their program’s dubious contributions to “female emancipation.” Although advocates of the subsidy particularly stressed the government’s involvement in the program was “solely in the interests of these young persons,” opponents easily dismissed their protests and the scheme itself as a product of “colonial fanaticism.”59 Ironically, organizers’ preoccupation with expanding the state’s biopolitical control of white women as well as their virulent racist fears undermined the cause by exposing their racial instrumentalization at the core of the scheme as white slavery. The Reichstag unanimously defeated the entitlement based on these very same prejudices. Though the defeat in the Reichstag demonstrated the limits of colonialists on the German right to emphasize the economic and reproductive value of female

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settlers over their cultural value, lack of state support did not prevent the Colonial Society from continuing to instrumentalize German women as economic and reproductive resources for colonial biopolitical ends. Most importantly, over the long term the public debate surrounding the controversy helped cement popular anxieties about the racial and sexual dangers of mixed-race unions in South West Africa, without resolving how German women could enter the same colonial space without risking their own exploitation and corruption.

Reactions to the Reichstag Defeat The published reactions to the Reichstag debate provide more complete evidence of this popular discomfort over German women in the colonies. The SPD-affiliated newspaper, Königsberger Hartungsche Zeitung (Hartung’s Königsberg News), claimed the Colonial Society’s plans to marry off girls corresponded to the antiquated, “feudal views that often prevail in colonial circles,” but contradicted “the customary beliefs of our people in human value and dignity.” More cynically, the liberal Voss Zeitung (Voss Newspaper), which catered to the educated middle class, editorialized against the proposed use of tax moneys and state assistance to subsidize cheap servants for colonial employers who could afford to hire indigenous servants and pay for their own brides’ travel. The staid, independent Munich Free Press, despite professing amusement, betrayed uneasiness as well with the image of state-sponsored marriage-mad women colonists chasing lonely male settlers. The paper editorialized that the program violated the ideal of the “true German marriage,” which should be a personal matter. An article in the newspaper of the SPD women’s movement, Die Gleichheit (Equality), questioned why organizers did not call on young ladies rather than working women to serve as imperial breeding stock, implying middle-class women might be more foolishly inclined to sacrifice themselves “on the altar of the Fatherland,” in the “name of German culture and the salvation of the German race.”60 The SPD urged German working women to reject such empty bourgeois nationalist appeals. The Reichstag debate was significant because it laid bare the inherent contradictions in the Colonial Society’s program, yet the legislative discussion never really resolved several of the most burning ideological issues, which prompted the German press to probe further. Above all, the political controversy opened popular debate over the problem of how to define German women’s role in the overseas empire. This question provoked startling anxiety, as Germans struggled to reconcile conflicting popular images of white, working-class female colonists, Africa, sexuality, and the meaning of imperial rule. The Reichstag debate had exposed the danger of German women’s sexual and reproductive exploitation in South West Africa at the hands of the German state, but these concerns were tied up with more-complex popular misgivings about race and sexuality in the colonies.

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The German press was quick to capture and expand on these fears. For example, the humor magazine U.L.K., a free weekly supplement to the middle-class Berliner Tagezeitung (Berlin Daily Press), imagined Minna Cauer leading an uprising of German women in feminist protest by abandoning the fatherland en masse. A short poem, “Song of Farewell of the Girls Moving to Africa,” depicts scores of German women fleeing to South West Africa in search of equal rights, asserting their sexuality and marrying African princes, only to be cannibalized by their black lovers. The farce further presented female equality as role-reversal: the German (racial-sexual) imperial order would topple and German culture would disintegrate as white women donned grass skirts and “went native,” consorting with black men attired in top hats and suits (see figure 1.1). Rather than producing fine German children, unruly female colonists would commit crimes against nature, bearing zebra-striped young. These satirical images express the wild anxieties that the notion of female colonial settlement raised among many circles in Germany. Promoting white women’s settlement in South West Africa meant sharing with them colonial authority and racial prestige, which until now had been white men’s privilege. Mobilizing these unmarried female settlers for South West Africa, exposing

Figure 1.1. A cartoon from the satirical magazine ULK titled “Abschiedslied der nach Afrika ziehenden Mädchen, Sehr frei nach Chr. F.D. Schubart.”) (“Song of Farewell from the Maids moving to Africa, Very Freely after Ch. F.D. Schubert.”) ULK. Illustriertes Wochenblatt für Humor und Satire 28, no. 11 (17 Mar. 1899): 4. Courtesy of the Bavarian State Library Munich, Shelf mark 2 Per. 24 k-28. Fair use.

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them to the colony and its black colonial subjects, risked opening German women to the same sexual liberations and racial dangers as German settler men. Yet another contribution to the ULK entitled “Protest Meeting of German Maidservants” offers a satirical parliamentary meeting of maids, lampooning the class origins, sexual mores, pretensions, and opportunism of upstart servant women discussing their possible emigration to South West Africa in colloquial language: “Fräulein Elisabeth (presently unemployed): We’ve got to find out how it works with weddings and false promises of marriage in Africa. I’ve already had lots of rotten experiences where the police didn’t punish lying cheats strongly enough. —Oh, yeah, can we take our kids with us? Otherwise, that’d be a pretty big hurdle. After all, a girl who’s half-upstanding wouldn’t take kindly to leaving her brat behind. (Many cheers!)”61 The extended farce presents these female servants as scheming, low women unworthy of emigration assistance and unfit to bear German culture to the colonies. Even their speech, delivered in urban working-class vernacular, denies their essential Germanness. This particular excerpt highlights servants’ sexual misconduct, insults their mothering skills, and belittles the value of their children. The absurdity of these women conducting a political meeting denigrated German feminists in the process, while underscoring the assumption that recruiting base servant women for colonial settlement demeaned the German nation and the race. A second cartoon, found in a second middle-class satirical illustrated magazine (figure 1.2) underscores the recurring themes of gender, class, and racial inversion and the danger of female empowerment.62 The first panel shows a seemingly modest maid, eyes downcast, surrounded by housewives bidding for her services. The second pictures her surrounded by gallant German colonial cavalry officers vying for her hand. The caption explains that the maid (girl) of all work, Rieke, de-

Figure 1.2. Clipping of a cartoon from the satirical magazine Kladderadatsch from March 1899 titled, “Illustrierte Rückblicke vom 1. Januar bis zum 31. März.” (“Illustrated Review from 1 January to 31 March.”) Kladderadatsch (Berlin) 52, no. 13 (26 Mar. 1899), Beiblatt, 142. Image courtesy of the University of Heidelberg Library. Signatur: https://doi .org/10.11588/diglit.3213#0142 Fair use.

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spite many offers, could find no permanently satisfying position in Germany. After seeking passage to South West Africa, she again received many offers, and finally advanced from her position as a “maid of all work” to become the “girl of one man.” Although milder than the Protest Meeting text, this cartoon nonetheless highlights the manipulative nature of the German woman/maid whose interests pitted her against her class superiors, and permitted her inappropriate cross-class alliance with a German officer. Such satirical representations in the German humorous press suggested fears that these empowered German women colonists would be far from defenseless white slaves, usurping powers far above their station. In South West Africa German settlers’ suspicions of the newly arrived servants were not so very different, as the next chapter reveals.

Conclusion German colonialists from the Christian antislavery movement put forth the original proposals to send German women to South West Africa to uphold German culture and morality through marriages with German settler men who would otherwise marry African women. If nothing were done to prevent interracial unions, they assumed that German men and settler society as a whole would devolve culturally to the inferior level of Africans. Their campaign succeeded in winning over the German governor of South West Africa, Theodor Leutwein, who also was eager to prevent intermarriages between German settler men and African women. Colonial Society agreed to accept applications from German men to subsidize the passages of their German brides and wives to South West Africa. Leutwein and his deputy governor von Lindequist pressured the German Colonial Society, under the leadership of President Mecklenburg, to organize the more controversial settlement of groups of unattached German women to South West Africa to work as maids and to serve as a pool of prospective settler men’s brides, but Mecklenburg at first resisted such a scheme as impractical. After radical nationalists in Germany increasingly depicted interracial marriages in South West Africa as a matter of German racial urgency, Mecklenburg finally agreed to sponsor unmarried German maids to work in German settler homes. When German feminists and missionary leaders sought to shape the scheme along the lines of other women’s colonization programs, especially the British Women’s Emigration Association, by assisting unmarried middle-class women to professional opportunities, Leutwein and Mecklenburg rejected their overtures, preferring to recruit more malleable and unpretentious maids from working-class and peasant backgrounds as more suited to the colonial frontier. In particular, Leutwein publicly rejected feminist Minna Cauer’s efforts to sponsor middle-class feminists to South West Africa, fearing they would alienate German settler men and encourage even greater intermarriage with African women.

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When Colonial Society and German colonial bureaucracy took an independent stance, rebuffing the involvement of missionary, philanthropy, and, especially feminist organizations, they reflected the narrowness of power within German colonial movement as a close partnership between the German colonial administration and patriotic organizations. Their autonomy diverged from other contemporary women’s colonization programs that operated the French and British settler colonies, which channeled more open public participation, However, this exclusion also allowed the German program to assume a more radical tenor, as more explicitly eugenic, pronatalist, and exploitative of its recruits. The Colonial Society eventually negotiated a contract for its sponsored maids through the German colonial administration and German settler families in South West Africa; the contract denied subsidized return fares for participants after three years of service at low wage rates for heavy labor, salaries that some critics compared to African servants. The Colonial Society’s program assisted the first two groups of twenty-two maids as well as several German wives and brides to South West Africa in 1898 and 1899, but faced criticism that their contracts were unfair, and even accusations that the program comprised white slavery—the trafficking of European women into overseas prostitution. When the German colonial division of the foreign ministry sought state funding to cover ongoing women’s colonization in South West Africa in the annual German colonial budget of 1899, social democratic and liberal opponents defeated the measure by exposing that German state promotion of women’s domestic service and marital opportunities in South West Africa represented inappropriate and exploitative interference in private, reproductive matters. By labelling the scheme to promote German women’s colonial settlement as dangerous colonial fanaticism, political critics brought the program to the attention of the wider German public. Newspaper editorials and satirical cartoons lampooned the notion of immoral German maids as the bearers of German culture and white superiority, and instead satirized the scheme for its potential to emancipate and elevate working-class German women, while also revealing anxiety over the danger of these women’s unnatural advancement and empowerment in the colonies, particularly their potential sexual emancipation and cross-racial contact with African men.

Notes 1. VDR X. Legislaturperiode. I. Session. 1898/1900. 54.Sitzung (11 Mar. 1899), 1471. On the background of Arenberg (1849–1907), see Horst Grüder, Geschichte der deutschen Kolonien (Stuttgart: UTB, 2018), 74. 2. Various estimates of the death toll range between twenty-four thousand and a hundred thousand Herero, ten thousand Nama, and an unknown number of Khoekhoen and !Kung populations; from Dominik J. Schaller, From Conquest to Genocide: Colonial Rule in German Southwest Africa and German East Africa (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 296. 3. Zimmerer, Deutscher Herrschaft, 94–97; Frank Becker, “Die ‘Bastardheime’ der Mission. Zum Status der Mischlinge in der kolonialen Gesellschaft Deutsch-Südwestafrikas,” in Rassenmischehen-Mischlinge—Rassentrennung. Zur Politik der Rasse im deutschen Kolonialreich,

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

ed. Frank Becker, 184–219 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2004); see p. 185 for discussion on acceptance for intermarriage; Wildenthal, “She Is the Victor,” 382–83, notes that the debate allowed German women their first opportunity to engage with women’s colonial roles. Both Wildenthal, German Women, 86–91, and Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten, 81–85, emphasize the impact of German administrators’ efforts to deter race mixing within the colony as an incursion against male settlers’ sexual prerogatives. VDR, 11 Mar. 1899, 1471–78; quote from page 1478. Allegations of “colonial zealotry” and “fanaticism” from Bebel, VDR, 11 Mar. 1899, 1477-78. Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, “The Threat of ‘Woolly-haired Grandchildren’: Race, the Colonial Family and German Nationalism,” History of the Family, 14, no. 4 (2016): 365. Arenberg’s remarks, VDR, 11 Mar. 1899, 1471. VDR, 11 Mar. 1899, 1471–78. Elke Christine Helen Harnisch, “Die progressive Etablierung kolonialen Wissens im Ausund Weiterbildungssektor des Deutschen Reiches zwischen 1884—1914” (PhD diss., Universität of Cologne 2015), 93. Correspondence and Essay (Denkschrift) from Schreiber, Barmen Mission, to foreign ministry colonial division Director Dr. Paul Kayser, 10 Mar. 1896, in the Bundesarchiv Berlin Lichterfelde (BAB) (German Federal Archives), Bestand des Reichskolonialamtes or RKA (Collection of the German Colonial Ministry) Signatur R.1001; file 5423, 5-12 and 19-20; Schreiber quoted, 7 and 19. Leutwein’s response to Schreiber’s remarks, addressed to the chancellor, 21 June 1896, agreed to tolerate interracial marriages “while the number of white women here remains so infinitesimally small.” (24). France continued to transport declining numbers of convicts to French Guiana and New Caledonia; Jean-Lucien Sanchez, “The French Empire, 1572–976,” in A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies, ed. Care Andersen (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 123–25. Franz Joseph von Bülow, Drei Jahre im Lande Hendrick Witboois. Schilderungen von Land und Leuten (Berlin, Mittler 1897) described settlement in South West Africa; Pierard, “German Colonial Society,” 153–57 described the settlement. Moritz Schanz, “Die deutsche Kolonialschule in Witzenhausen,” biographical overview of Fabarius, Beiheft zum Tropenpflanzer 10, no. 6 (1910): 397–98. Fabarius was active as a member of the Rhenish Group of the Evangelical African Society, which formed in 1893 to combat slavery in German East Africa. He was a student of the anti-Semite and racist von Treitschke and a particular believer in white moral and cultural supremacy, as discussed in Michael Olbrich-Majer, “Politische Aspekte im Werke Rudolf Steiners,” in der Projectgruppe Natürlich Bunt Conference Proceedings, natürlich bunt. Das politische Spektrum der ökologischen Landwirtschaft. Dokumentationsband der 20. Witzenhäuser Konferenz 04.—08. Dezember 2012 (Kassel: Universität Kassel, 2013), 44. He wrote Die allgemeine weibliche Dienstpflicht: ein Vorschlag und Beitrag zur Lösung der Frauenfrage von E.A. Fabarius (Berlin: Bardeker, 1895); see also Ernst Albrecht Fabarius, “Deportation von Verbrechern nach den deutschen Kolonien? I. Teil,” Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift 23 (1896): 504–16. Fabarius, “Deportation von Verbrechern,” 506; Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, “The Purpose of German Colonialism, or the Long Shadow of Bismarck’s Colonial Policy,” in Langbehn and Salama, German Colonialism, 200–201. Von Strandmann argues the institutionalization of economic motives under Bismarck explains the divergence in German colonialism. “Bericht über die ordentliche Hauptversammlung der Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft im Berlin am 30 Mai 1896,” pamphlet, 14–15 in the Archival collection of the German Colonial Society at the BAB, Signatur R 8023 (hereafter abbreviated as DKG, followed by archival file number, stamped pagination.) DKG 170, 9. Catherine L. Dollard, The Surplus Woman: Unmarried in Imperial Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), esp. 3–10. See also Marie-Paul Ha, French Women and the Empire: The Case of Indochina (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Rita Kranidis, The Colonial Spinster and Colonial Emigration (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).

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15. DKG 170, 12-15, Bergrat [Max] Busse, Koblenz, to the Colonial Society president, 29 July 1896, 16. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge 2–8. 17. Jean Quataert, Staging Philanthropy: Patriotic Women and the National Imagination in Dynastic Germany, 1813–1916 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 183–85. 18. Wildenthal, German Women, chapter 1, outlines the nursing organization’s work. DKG 170, 18–19 and 20–21, President Mecklenburg, Berlin to Colonial Division, 14 Aug. 1896, Response by von Schwarzkopfen, Colonial Division, Berlin, 21 Aug. 1896, 22; Bericht über die Sitzung des Ausschusses vom (5 Jan. 1897), 31. 19. [Franz Joseph] von Bülow, “Zur Frauenfrage in Südwestafrika,” DKZ 14, 22 (20 May 1897), Beilage, 57 and Drei Jahre. 20. Quoted from Professor Dr. Jur. Felix Friedrich Bruck, “Die Zukunft Deutsch Südwestafrikas,” Neue Preußische Zeitung no. 9 (7 Jan. 1898), 2 and fn7. 21. DKG 170, 27, Leutwein, Swakopmund, 25 Oct. 1896 to Chancellor Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, Berlin. 22. “Auswanderung nach Südwestafrika,” DKZ, 14, no. 7 (13 Feb. 1897): 63, cites the Tägliche Rundschau (Berlin), 6 Feb. 1897 in full. Emphasis in original. 23. Bruck, “Die Zukunft,” fn 7. Colonial Society membership table, Pierard, “German Colonial Society,” 106. On mass newspaper reading, and reading in general in Germany, see Peter Fritsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 51–53; and Gideon Reuveni, Reading Germany: Literature and Consumer Culture in Germany before 1933 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 73. 24. Eley, Reshaping, esp. 68, 218–21. 25. The issue became a topic of discussion at its 1898 general assembly, “Hauptversammlung des Deutschen Frauenvereins,” DKZ 15, no. 22 (2 June 1898): 200 mentions its 1,200 members against the 21,000 of the Colonial Society in 1897; DKG 170, 35-80. Colonial Society letter to Generalleutnant z.D. Keller, head of Koblenz chapter, 31 Mar. 1897, declines the proposed questionnaire of settlers about maids, and 12 May 1897 declines to add the Koblenz proposal on women’s emigration to the annual general assembly agenda. 26. DKG 170, 35-80. President Mecklenburg finally approved a series of requests for subsidies in June 1897: Frau Hagen and her four children, Frau Militär-Anwärters Carow, and Paula Pusch. Executive Vice President Adolph Sachse wrote that there might be the possibility to work with the Rhenish group of the Evangelical Mission Society, but neither he nor Governor Leutwein found it necessary to establish a new organization for the purpose. (DKG 170, 171, 15 Jan. 1898, to Fabarius). 27. For example, Joseph Chailley-Bert of the Union coloniale française (French Colonial Union), under sustained French public criticism, encouraged the formation of the French Society for the Emigration of women as a separate organization with Marie Pégard as its head. O’Donnell, “French and German Women”; for discussion of British women’s colonization societies see also Bush, Edwardian Ladies. 28. DSWA, L.II.k.1, Bd. 1, 1-2. Quote from the report, Deputy Governor Lindequist, Windhoek, to the chancellor, titled Bericht No. 790 betr. Frauenfrage, 13 Oct. 1897. Quote, 1. DKG 171, 339, Governor’s office circular, Windhoek, addressed to Leutwein, Berlin, 26 April 1898 includes Lieutenant Heinemann and his Rehoboth Baster wife among the applicants. 29. Leutwein, “Deutsch Südwestafrika,” speech, 14 Jan. 1898, Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft. Verhandlungen der Abteilung Berlin-Charlottenburg (Berlin: Verlag von Dietrich Reimer, 1900), 41. 30. “Major Leutwein über den Frauenmangel in Deutsch Südwestafrika,” Die Post (30 Nov. 1897) press cutting in DKG 170, 165. (Die Post was a Free Conservative newspaper). DSWA, L.II.k.1, Bd. 1, 7, Leutwein, Berlin, handwritten note to Lindequist, Windhoek, 28 Dec. 1897. 31. DKG 170, 134, 10 Dec. 1897 correspondence to Leutwein, Berlin, from Colonial Society General secretary von Bornhaupt. Lindequist quoted from Bericht No. 790 betr. Frauen-

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32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

39.

frage, reverse of page 2. Friedrich von Lindequist (1862–1945) served as Leutwein’s second, then in the German consulate in Cape Town, succeeded Leutwein as governor of South West Africa from 1905 to 1907, then undersecretary of the German Colonial Ministry from 1907 to 1910, and secretary from 1910 to 1911, and also as a vice president of the German Colonial Society. He was a founding member of the radical nationalist German Fatherland Party, and after World War I he became a leading official in the German Colonial Society, later serving in the Nazi era in the Reich Colonial League and Colonial Political Office. See also his Who’s Who entry: https://www.namibiana.de/namibia-information/who-is-who/autoren/ infos-zur-person/friedrich-von-lindequist.html Lindequist’s unpublished memoirs in the German Federal Archives in Koblenz, Kleine Erwerbungen 275; Lindequist, Südwestafrikanische Erlebnisse, 1895–1906 (Manuscript, post-1926). He supported women’s colonization as governor and Colonial Secretary, and indirectly as a high official in the Reich Colonial League in the Nazi era. DKG 170, 132-3; copy DSWA, L.II.k.1, Bd. 1, 3-6, Lindequist Circular, Windhoek, 28 Sept. 1897 forwarded to the German Colonial Society, Berlin. Fräulein M. Klammt (who seems likely to have been the nom de plume of Mother Melchiora Klammt, head of the Elizabeth Sisters order of nuns and headmistress of its rural girls’ housework and handwork school in Silesia) identifies herself as part of the international women’s organization headquartered in Darmstadt, the Allgemeine Frauen-Correspondenz (General Women’s Correspondence) which collected and shared information on feminist activism in Europe and the United States and worked with the German Lette-Verein to expand women’s employment as detailed in Cordelia Scharpf, “‘Arbeit für Alle!’: Die internationalen Frauenkonferenzen des ‘Verbands deutscher Frauenbildungs- und Erwerbsvereine,” Ariadne Forum für Frauen- und Geschlechtergeschichte Heft 76 (June 2020), 68–83. In Klammt’s article, “Major Leutwein über den Frauenmangel in Deutsch-Südwestafrika,” she claims that Leutwein had proposed a women’s organization and dormitory scheme, but Leutwein later denied this charge, attributed these ideas to Klammt, and claimed to have rejected her suggestions. DSWA, L.II.h.1, Bd. 1, 23). Klammt also approached the German Colonial Society with similar results (DKG 170, 130). Documentary evidence seems to establish that Leutwein entertained the idea of a dormitory at least briefly, relying on Lindequist and his underlings to report the prospects for such a scheme. See chapter four of this book for more on the history of German women’s dormitories in South West Africa. Venghiattis, “Mobilizing,” 23–24. DSWA, L.II.h.1, Bd. 1, 10-15; Lindequist to Leutwein, 2 Feb. 1898, Windhoek to Leutwein in Berlin. Lindequist quoted, 11 and 15. Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Elizabeth Heineman, What Difference Does a Husband Make: Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) paint a much more active role for state intervention from the Weimar era onward. Pastor Merensky, “Der Rheinische Verband und die Frauenfürsorge für Deutschsüdwestafrika,” Afrika no. 2 (Feb. 1898): 36–39, clipping in DKG 171, 315ff. Minna Cauer, née Schelle (1941–1922) founded the Berlin Verein Frauenwohl in 1888 and became a leader of the left liberal wing of the bourgeois women’s movement in Germany. She particularly interested herself in problems related to women’s education and professions. Neue Deutsche Biographie Bd. 3 (1956), 176. Women played a central role in Wilhelmine female and family-oriented charities. Catherine Prelinger, Charity, Challenge and Change: Religious Dimensions of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Women’s Movement in Germany (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987). Cauer quoted in DKG 174, 169, stamped June 1899; Wildenthal, “Colonizers and Citizens,” 51–55. Quoted from “Zur Frauen-Kolonisationsfrage,” Die Frauenbewegung 4, no. 7 (1 April 1898), 77-78 and Kais. Landeshauptmann Leutwein, “Offener Brief an die Herausgeberin,” Die Frauenbewegung 4, no. 9 (1 May 1898): 99–100; Leutwein defended himself to his superi-

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40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46.

47. 48.

49.

50.

51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

ors against the March 1899 allegations in the Reichstag of his rudeness to the clubwomen, DSWA, L.II.h.1, Bd.1, 22-23, no date. “Aufruf,” DKZ 14, no.17 (24 Apr. 1897): 165. Call for middle-class women as colonial nursing applicants from the Deutscher Frauenverein für das Krankenpflege in den Kolonien. Quoted from DKG 170, 98-9. Leutwein, Windhoek, to the Colonial Society, Berlin, 12 July 1897, (99). Wildenthal, German Women, 131–34. DSWA, L.II.k.1, Bd. 1, 4. Circular letter addressed to various German colonists, Lindequist, Windhoek, 6 Oct. 1897, More than twenty settlers signed the document, agreeing to the first, more generous terms he describes, indicating that most colonists did not consider these unreasonable. DKG, 171, 339ff, updated drafts dated 23 and 26 Apr. 1898. Dagmar Müller-Staats, Klagen über Dienstboten. Eine Untersuchung über Dienstboten und ihre Herrschaften (Frankfurt a/M.: Insel Verlag, 1987), 146–48; Dorothee Wierling, Mädchen für alles. Arbeitsalltag und Lebensgeschichte städtischer Dienstmädchen um die Jahrhundertwende (Berlin and Bonn: Verlag J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., 1987), 90–92. DKG 171, 376, copy of final contract, 26 Aug. 1898. DSWA, L.II.k.1, Bd. 1, 22 reverse. Handwritten note from Mecklenburg at his family estate to Leutwein, Windhoek, 10 July 1898. The idea of the state withholding a large percentage of servants’ salaries in order to save enough money for any necessary return fares did arise in the negotiations. DKG 171, 381-383, Seidel, Berlin, requirements for applicants, hectograph, n.d., Readers may note that the age limit for participants fluctuated over time. DKG 171, 111, letter from the Settlement Company for South West Africa, Berlin, to the Colonial Society headquarters, Berlin, 17 Oct. 1898, outlines the travel arrangements. Regarding the selections, Sachse, Berlin, to Leutwein, Windhoek, 22 Oct. 1898, DSWA, L.II, k.1, Bd. 1, 30-34, quote, 31. Quote from DKG 171, 384, Colonial Society to referees, n.d Leutwein, Windhoek to Colonial Society Executive Vice President Sachse in Berlin, 28 Dec. 1898, DKG 173, 2-3 and 13032, and 116, clipping of news report by Max Hilzebecher, “Aus Südwestafrika-die Ankunft der deutsche Mädchen,” dated Windhoek 9 January 1899, reprinted in the Deutsche Rundschau Bromberg (9 Mar. 1899). DKG 172, 295, clipping of “‘Nichte ‘Vergißmeinnicht,’” Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten, 14 Nov. 1898, 3, and 294-303, Letter from Fabrikbesitzer Heino Kretzschmar, DresdenAltstadt, to the Colonial Society, Berlin, 21 Nov. 1898. Reply, 22 Nov. 1898. Further exchange initiated by Kretzschmar on 1 Dec. 1898 and reply, Sachse, 28 Dec. 1898. Regler’s essay, L.II.k.1, Bd. 1, 57-58. Quoted from 57 reverse and 58. Emphasis in original. Marion A. Kaplan, “German-Jewish Feminism in the Twentieth Century,” Jewish Social Studies 38, no. 1 (Winter 1976): 39–53; Elisa Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009),102–12. Camiscioli notes that the League of Nations revised the term to “trafficking” in 1921 to include women of color. See also the study of organized Jewish procurers and prostitution in South Africa, Charles van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 1886–1914, vol. 1, New Babylon (London: Longmann, 1982), 106–50. Kölnische Zeitung, Zweite Morgen-Ausgabe, 189 (9 Mar. 1899). DKG 173, 118, Clipping of the progressive newspaper quotes an unnamed Reichstag deputy, “Hausklaverei für Weiße,” Königsberger Hartung’sche Zeitung, Morgenausgabe, no. 59 (10 Mar. 1899). Quoted from clipping of “Allerhand kuriose Sachen,” Münchner Freie Presse 60 (13 Mar. 1899), DKG 173, 129. VdR X. Legislaturperiode. I.Session. 1898/1900. 54.Sitzung (11 Mar. 1899), 1471. Quoted from VdR, 11 Mar. 1899, 1472. Quted from VdR, 11 Mar. 1899, 1473.

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58. Quoted from VdR, 11 Mar. 1899, 1474. Emphasis in original. 59. Quoted from VdR, 11 Mar. 1899, 1473, 1475 and 1477. 60. DKG 173, 115, 118-9, and 129, clippings of anonymous, “Haussklaverei für Weiße”; “Über die Entsendung von Frauen und Mädchen nach Südwestafrika,” Vossische Zeitung (Berlin) 16, no. 128 (16 Mar. 1899); “Allerhand kuriose Sachen,” Documents 115–204 passim in this archival file include a considerable number of newspaper articles on the Reichstag hearing provided by a literary agency. The SPD’s journal for women workers also published a critique, “Patriotische Heiratskuppelei,” Die Gleichheit. Zeitschrift für die Interessen Arbeiterinnen 9, no. 7 (29 Mar. 1899), 1-2. 61. DKG 173, 148-50, clipping of “Abschiedslied der nach Afrika ziehenden Mädchen. Sehr frei nach Chr. F.D. Schubart,” and “Protestversammlung deutscher Dienstmädchen,” ULK. Illustrirtes Wochenblatt für Humor und Satire 28, no. 11 (17 Mar. 1899): 4–5. 62. DKG 173, 162 reverse, clipping of “Illustrierte Rückblicke vom 1.Januar bis zum 31. März,” Beiblatt zum Kladderadatsch (Berlin) 52, no. 13 (26 Mar. 1899), 142.

  CHAPTER 2

“The Defilement of Our Daughters”

Two years after August Bebel stymied the German state’s efforts at promoting German women’s colonization in South West Africa, in March 1901 the leader of the German SPD again condemned the Colonial Society’s program, citing the society’s neglect of its sponsored female settlers in South West Africa. Though Bebel and other critics on the political left had successfully denied direct state subsidies for the program in March 1899, the Colonial Society sent its second, small contingent of unmarried servants to the colony that November. Soon afterward, though, Leutwein informed the Colonial Society that there were no further servant openings in the colony. So, beginning in 1900, the Colonial Society offered free passages only in response to direct requests from German settlers for assistance for their relatives and dependents to emigrate. Most of these applications were from settler men seeking subsidized passages for their brides, wives, and other adult family members. Bebel continued to attack the program, especially highlighting the precarious conditions that participant German women faced in South West Africa: “I was told by a man who has lived several years in Southwest Africa that the majority of these girls have had experiences that are in no way favorable for them: of circa sixty to seventy girls, there are only twenty-five still there, of whom most are married. The other ones returned [to Germany] as quickly as possible. . . . He also said that some of the married ones have run away from their husbands, and several have committed suicide.”1 He alleged that the Colonial Society failed to protect the German women sponsored to the colony. Bebel railed against the Colonial Society’s program as an especially colorful and controversial political target, which he and fellow critics on the left continued to represent as a plot by German colonialist fanatics to exploit vulnerable working-class German women. The SPD remained staunchly anticolonial through World War I, and Bebel had documented German women’s unequal social and economic status in his famed book, Die Frau und der

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Sozialismus (Women and Socialism).2 German women who fled their husbands in the colony were more vulnerable. Bebel had noted in his 1899 Reichstag speech in 1899 that German women in Southwest Africa without employment had little recourse beyond prostitution. His ongoing allegations against the Colonial Society’s women settlement efforts played to his expertise in women’s issues as well as the broader German public’s unease about sending single German women to Africa, as explored in the previous chapter. Arguably, Bebel’s public crusade against the alleged fanaticism of the project created an impasse for the Colonial Society: through sustained public ridicule, Bebel and his fellow critics not only successfully obstructed the organization’s efforts to recruit large numbers of servants as potential brides of German men in South West Africa, but also cast doubt on the possibility of successfully settling German women there. As this chapter reveals, despite the symbolic importance of German women’s colonial settlement, neither the posturing of German colonialists nor their critics successfully safeguarded German settler women’s well-being. Though Bebel acknowledged that many of the program’s sponsored settler women found husbands in South West Africa, he claimed many of their marriages were troubled and their households economically insecure—resulting in their divorces, returns to Germany, and even suicides. In his book Women and Socialism, Bebel depicted the German institution of marriage as an exploitative, patriarchal institution. His provocative comments cast doubt on the Colonial Society’s efforts, discouraging German women from settling in South West Africa. The German Colonial Society and colonial administration countered his claims in news reports touting the great marital happiness that sponsored female colonists found in South West Africa. Archival records contain detailed reports by German officials in the colony on the program’s participants, revealing that many of the participants were not happy. Unfortunately, the officials and police who investigated them rarely commented on married women’s welfare, since that would have intruded on settler men’s patriarchal rights and privacy. (Table A.3 in the appendix outlines how the first two groups of servant women fared in South West Africa, based on a number of these administrative reports on participants’ long-term well-being in the colony.) Census tables reveal that, at the start of 1900, only about 403 white women resided in the colony, which indicates that these sponsored women were highly visible to other German settlers. As a result, the white settler community spread detailed gossip and innuendo, particularly about the unmarried servants. Investigating German officials reported the gossip to the Colonial Society. The Colonial Society shared superficial information with the German public, yet these reports offer a wealth of evidence that the experiment in German women’s sponsored colonization was unsuccessful. This chapter draws on these reports and other evidence that indicate the colonial administration’s failure to safeguard German women settlers in South West Africa was already apparent even before the eruption of the Herero and Nama Wars in 1904, during which many Germans

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died. Data suggest that an overrepresentative number of the Colonial Society’s sponsored settlers were among those widowed, injured, and killed.

Background: German Settlement and Causes of War Measures promoting the settlement of German women in South West Africa from 1898 forward aimed for more white brides for German homesteaders, who might otherwise have relations with biracial and black African women. The German civilians in outposts among the majority African population were most at risk in attacks on white settlers first by the Herero in January 1904, followed by the Nama in October 1904. Most histories show that German military forces viewed these assaults as murders and responded with disproportionate violence, well beyond what was necessary to defend white civilians or subdue African fighters. Individual German soldiers’ diaries reveal the many atrocities they committed or observed against Africans, and still more went undocumented. German soldiers slaughtered Africans: they burned down their encampments and villages, shot noncombatants, executed prisoners, raped women, and even abused their own servants. Most German accounts deplored Africans’ brutality, yet were nearly silent about their own.3 The narrative that follows highlights how the Germans justified their reprisals within the context of patriarchal notions of chivalry and honor. Even after German forces declared an end to hostilities in 1907, a few Nama troops engaged in sporadic guerilla raids. Other forms of African resistance continued as well, which fed paranoia among whites and justified further atrocities after the official end of the wars. While German propaganda depicted German settler women as martyrs, they pictured Herero women as castrating black Amazons in rationalizing their violence.4 Most historical accounts agree that the primary motives of the Herero and Nama were to address their harsh treatment under German rule and their growing losses of cattle herds and lands to white settlers. After 1898 the pattern of intensified German state-sponsored homesteading in South West Africa encouraged prospective German farmers with limited economic means to repossess African land, cattle, and other property, often by deceiving them into debt. Many accounts demonstrate that colonial authorities frequently a blind eye or even were complicit in the settlers’ trickery, dispossession, and even rape and physical abuse of Africans. In the face of growing racial tensions, the Leutwein administration in 1903 enacted plans to begin relocating Herero, Nama, and other major ethno-linguistic groups to newly established native reserves. The simmering political, property, and personal disputes between Africans and whites first exploded in violence in January 1904, when Herero soldiers attacked German fortifications and homesteads. Though African combatants killed about 120 German men and plundered cattle and other property, they largely spared most of the white and biracial wives and

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children of male settlers and most of the non-Germans. The majority of settlers received warnings of African soldiers amassing in time to flee to German fortifications and mission stations. Able-bodied German settler men soon became conscripts in the colonial troops, where many became complicit in unleashing atrocities against the Herero and Nama, as well as spillover violence toward noncombatant populations, including the Damara and Khoekhoen, and !Kung.5 Published war diaries and memoirs recounted to German readers the many harrowing experiences of German settler women who lost family members and loved ones in the assaults on their homesteads, and paid tribute to the few white women who died. Germans continued colonizing South West Africa even as the battles raged on. The Colonial Society records show that the society assisted settler men’s wives, brides, children, and other relatives with subsidized passages throughout the wars. The Colonial Society even proclaimed that their prewar successes in establishing a resident population of German women in South West Africa justified an expansion of their women’s settlement efforts in the postwar era. In the postwar era from 1907 on, German settlers arrived in even greater numbers to stake their claims in South West Africa, in part thanks to the wartime economic boom from the discovery of alluvial diamonds near Lüderitzbucht in 1908, the strategic extension of railroads into the southern regions of the colony, and the additional homesteading claims of thousands of German veterans of the wars. After the conflicts, the German Colonial Society and colonialists asserted even more stridently that the growing population of white settler men needed imported German women as brides to forestall race-mixing with African women.

The First German Servant Women’s Settlement in South West Africa Before 1900 Colonial Society’s settlement efforts yielded spotty results. The society brought two groups of unmarried German women to work as maids in South West Africa—twelve in November 1898 and ten in November 1899 through a controversial employment contract that limited participants’ rights to return passages. Prior to these efforts, most white female passengers to the colony came from cultivated, middle-class backgrounds, so they typically occupied first- or second-class cabins on the Woermann Line steamships to South West Africa. Subsidized passages for servants in the third-class consisted of open steerage on the middle deck, which—even with chaperones—meant risqué communal sleeping arrangements between unrelated men and women. Instead, the shipping company quickly converted a shipboard powder chamber for the second shipload of maids’ shared use. The women later complained that the tightly enclosed space not only smelled of lingering gunpowder residue, but was also unbearably hot and miserable. They also decried the poor and insufficient food and drink onboard.6

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Three of the women found prospective husbands among their fellow travelers, and in one case was married to a ship’s first officer rather than to a colonist. That woman reneged on her work contract and refused to take up her assigned employment. The ship’s other passengers apparently regarded these women’s liaisons on the high seas as highly improper, and the betrothed maid’s refusal to fulfill her contract angered organizers. Governor Leutwein deplored the recruited servants’ lofty expectations and self-importance: “Most of the maids sent out last time were too attached to the idea that their only purpose for emigrating was to marry, . . . [and] some of them thought there were no white women at all in the colony . . . . Those who thought so felt disappointed here, and naturally they have become only mediocre maidservants.”7 Leutwein summed up Colonial Society’s efforts at recruiting servants as wholly disappointing. When the second party of sponsored maids arrived in Swakopmund in December 1899, roughly a year after the first group, locals began calling them disparagingly the first and second Christmas packages. The Colonial Society’s persistence in even pursuing a second trial was surprising: in the wake of the Reichstag scandal of 1899, colonial director von Buchka halted all further participation by the colonial administration in the society’s private servant contracts. Without Leutwein’s provisions for inland transport, most of the newly arrived German women would have no protection or means to travel from their port of arrival in Swakopmund to Windhoek or other destinations.8 Disregarding Buchka’s orders, Leutwein ordered one of his underlings to collect and transport the women by oxen wagon. The governor and the Colonial Society justified this assistance on the grounds that the maids’ contracts had been sealed before the Colonial Division of the foreign ministry intervened.9 Soon after the second group’s landing, Leutwein not only expressed his deep dissatisfaction with the recruits, but he also abruptly declared that the need for domestics in South West Africa was covered, with no further openings for immigrant maids. When the Colonial Society questioned when more servants would be needed, he replied, “A new shipment [would] not be necessary for some time.”10 His unexplained pronouncement effectively halted the Colonial Society’s efforts to recruit unmarried women for the colony after only the second group transport, though the Colonial Society did not announce that the program had stalled. Leutwein’s decision to end the group colonization might have been founded on colonial director Buchka’s orders to maintain distance after the Reichstag debacle, but Leutwein reported other glaring problems with the servants as well, including their grumblings about the ship’s accommodations, scandalous romantic interludes, and broken contracts with employers. Leutwein reported on each of the maids individually, revealing how unpleasant local gossip surrounded the current servants. For example, one had become notorious for pursuing men: “As I discovered behind the scenes from the Mission station, Geyh leaves much to desire in regard to her character. In the first place, she appears

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Figure 2.1. Colonial wedding at the Windhoek commissioner’s office ca. 1899. Seems to be a previously unknown photograph of colonialist author Helene Nitze von Falkenhausen with her groom, Baron Fritz von Falkenhausen. Governor Theodore Leutwein appears at the right of the photo in uniform, and Commander Ludwig von Estorff appears to be the other officer on the left. https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/kolonialesbildarchiv/ content/titleinfo/11487118 Courtesy of the Colonial Picture Archive, Goethe University Frankfurt/Main Library: urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-680029.

‘man-crazy’ [männervoll]; she gets herself engaged . . . as soon as the opportunity presents itself, only to disengage herself at the same speed if she can’t lead the bridegroom in question directly to the altar.”11 Leutwein seems to have perceived that German settlers’ gossip had tarnished the maids’ reputations as a group, which discouraged prospective employers from requesting more servants from Germany. In October 1901, the Colonial Society’s journal reported that the governor declared that the colony had sufficient maids.12 Leutwein’s detailed revelations of settlers’ gossip about the servants in his report to the Colonial Society exposed just how deeply these women’s independence and promiscuity had disrupted the mores of the German community. One result of settlers’ reactions was their dismissiveness of the women, which led the settlers to mock the Colonial Society’s settlement efforts. Oscar Hintrager described how decades later German settlers still recalled which women had arrived in these first transports, and joked about “Christmas

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packages”: “It would have been easier to guard a sack of fleas than to bring 25 marriage-mad maids by oxen wagon from Swakopmund to Windhoek. The girls would hardly stay together, and unfortunately the menfolk could not be held back.”13 Settlers objectified and joked about the women who arrived thanks to the sexual and pronatalist motivation of the transports, however, their scorn should not be taken as an indication that colonialist biopolitics were trivial. These women’s arrival transgressed the sexual and racial boundaries of colonial space because they were unattached. Settler men’s German wives and brides who arrived in the same ships did not suffer the same ridicule, because their male family members upheld their honor, and the numbers of these sponsored female dependents continued to grow. The gossip about the women’s mediocrity as servants and aggressiveness toward men also seemed to upend the claims of Bebel and his fellow colonial critics that the Colonial Society program exploited them as workers and endangered their morals. Administrators’ reports provided far less information about the women once they married, a persistent pattern in the colonial records that confirms the patriarchal bias among white settlers. Officials seemed to assume that since these women’s husbands now bore full legal responsibility for their well-being and private reputations, that gossip about wives would damage their husbands’ honor and result in slander cases or even violence. Historical research shows how German men expressed an exaggerated patriarchal masculinity in South West Africa through their control of black and white women, founded on old-fashioned notions of male honor and chivalry.14 While German officials presumed the well-being of the married women, Bebel correctly warned in 1901 that many of German settler marriages in South West Africa were troubled. As table A.3 in the appendix indicates, by early 1900 a few broken engagements and marriages already had taken place among the first two shiploads of sponsored maids. Among the first group, after eighteen months in South West Africa only four of the original twelve servant women were still single, two of whom were reportedly engaged but gossip claimed they were waiting to wed in order to claim their free passages back to Germany. Among the servants who continued working, several had changed positions, some more than once. Their wages now ranged from 30 to 70 marks monthly, exceeding three-year contract provisions of 25 to a maximum of 60 marks. Among the second group of ten servant women who arrived in 1899, in less than six months five had found fiancés, while a sixth engagement had dissolved acrimoniously. Five of this second group also had given up their original posts for new ones, or were planning to do so in the near future, leaving with little notice to their employers.15 In short, the majority of the servants had simply abandoned their contracts in order to pursue better prospects, either on the marital or the labor market. These women maneuvered to their best advantage, which would seem to undermine Bebel’s fears their vulnerability in South West Africa. Bebel might have

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overstated his claims, as well, though some supporting evidence backs up his allegations. For instance, archival materials do show that many of the sponsored female settlers eventually left the colony due to health and financial concerns. An obvious pattern of their departures from Windhoek was clear by November 1900, when the most recent city directory listed only eight of the original twenty maids who started out there, though four more had relocated elsewhere in the colony. Reports also confirmed that a few were in insecure relationships, including a former maid caught in a divorce, and another with a child out of wedlock though she lived with her fiancé.16 More strikingly, newspapers reported that one of the sponsored women residing in Windhoek shot herself and that other white women in South West Africa also died in mysterious circumstances in late 1900. Governor Leutwein reported in the wake of Bebel’s claims of multiple suicides in South West Africa that a nineteen-year-old woman whom the Colonial Society had helped to emigrate to Windhoek might have killed herself. Leutwein reported that, in October 1900, shortly after her arrival, Frida Schön, “died from a self-inflicted revolver shot.”17 Though Leutwein considered her death accidental, circumstances point to suicide. Schön was not the only Colonial Society immigrant to kill herself. These self-harming women may have regretted their impulse to emigrate without the means of returning to Germany.18 As Leutwein also admitted, two other German women in South West Africa also recently met violent demises. He offered sparse details about them. First, he recounted a tragic story involving an unnamed German bride, whom he claimed had no connection to the Colonial Society’s program. She had arrived in the colony to marry her German fiancé, and then reportedly poisoned herself only days after their wedding. Nor had the Colonial Society sponsored the other deceased woman, a housekeeper named Marie Winter, who drowned fully clothed on an isolated beach after disembarking at Swakopmund. Leutwein revealed an upsetting pattern in which white women may have found their situations in South West Africa unbearable, but also raising suspicions of underlying sexual or domestic violence.19 These three women’s untimely deaths substantiated Bebel’s concerns for white women’s welfare in South West Africa, though Leutwein would not acknowledge any grounds for alarm. Instead, he announced there would be no further servants recruited for South West Africa, blaming Bebel’s malicious interference for the cancellation of the sponsored servant program: “Deputy Bebel pretends that he stands up for the poor working people against so-called capitalism. . . . But in this [case], the money of the capitalists is used to create a future for poor girls, most from the working classes, and this is not right, in his opinion. Moreover, I have already informed the society that I would no longer make a request for the importation of maids for service, because the need has been covered.”20 Though Bebel’s sustained attacks prevailed in halting the trial to settle German servants in South West Africa as prospective male settlers’ brides, the Colonial Society per-

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sisted through the continued sponsorship of German settlers’ dependents (including a few directly contracted maids) instead. Their efforts to sponsor further white settler women and children grew, despite the disturbing proof of white women’s insecurity in South West Africa.

Barriers to Mass Women’s Settlement in South West Africa The Colonial Society advertised free passages for German settler men’s fiancées, wives, female relatives, and children to South West Africa. Prospective settlers could bring their family members with them at discounted fares, while interested German settlers in the colony could apply for a dependent’s subsidized transportation through their local administrative office. (Servants were eligible for subsidy only in cases where colonial employers recruited them privately, without contractual obligations or protections such as return passages.) Complications ensued. Perhaps because the number of German settlers in the colony was still quite small, few requests arose at first. In addition, many eligible German settlers’ brides and other family members resisted leaving Germany. (Perhaps some had read Bebel’s startling revelations.) Among five women approved for subsidies in late 1899, none could join the planned second servant transport as chaperones. Two brides broke their engagements to settlers to marry men in Germany rather than leave for Africa. A third fiancée vacillated for months, and then cancelled her journey, too. A father’s sudden, grave illness prevented one woman from joining her brother, and another woman refused because she could not break her contract as a department store trainee. In 1898 the Colonial Society had faced a comparable number of refusals and cancellations. Despite these setbacks and the end of servant recruitment, in the year 1900 the Colonial Society eventually facilitated twenty-one new women and children who were dependents of existing settlers to South West Africa.21 Among these individuals, the story of the Krieß family further demonstrates the Colonial Society’s difficulties. Fritz Krieß, a colonial veteran and homesteader, requested a subsidy for his fiancée, who was an orphaned peasant woman named Anna Schmidt living with his mother in rural Saxony and whom he had known from his school days. When Anna refused to emigrate, Fritz’s sister offered to go in her place though he begged his family to convince Anna, explaining in crass terms why he wanted a wife: “First of all, since I have founded a household here, I need a wife now in every regard, and not a bad one to be sure. If I must now be tormented by myself, that is, always be alone, without having reasonable food, although it costs me a great deal anyway, and not having a clean piece of laundry to put on my body. . . . At the very least, however, I will join myself to a girl.”22 Krieß does not make clear whether by “joining himself to a girl,” he means an informal relationship with an African woman or arranging a mail-order or otherwise unknown bride from Germany. Neither arrangement was unusual in South West

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Africa.23 The lonely and sparse frontier conditions that made Krieß so desperate to find a wife probably discouraged many male settlers’ dependents from migrating to South West Africa. Applicants’ delays and reversals proved time-consuming and frustrating to the Colonial Society’s head office staff in Berlin. They followed a tedious application process that typically began when a colonist filed an application through his or her colonial Bezirks- or Distriktsamt (district or regional administrative office) in South West Africa. The Colonial Society required local administrative officers to confirm in writing that applicants seeking a dependent’s subsidized passage would remain in South West Africa for the foreseeable future and could bear financial support for their family members. Local officials sought out the necessary testimonials and references from the applicants and, if relevant, their employers. Once these inquiries were satisfied, the district officer in question sent all approved applications and supporting documentation through the civil administration’s chain of command. After review by the governor’s office in Windhoek, secretaries forwarded the dossiers to the Colonial Society office in Berlin via steamship mail, which added more than a month. Upon receiving the files, Colonial Society administrators in Berlin contacted each prospective emigrant in Germany in writing. If she was an unmarried woman of any age, her parents or guardians also had to give signed permission for her emigration. Finally, if all went well, the Colonial Society arranged passage with the steamship line, paid the necessary fees, and notified the applicant in South West Africa of the impending arrivals of the relative or servants. Even if the next steamship had an available berth, it often took more time for prospective emigrants to make elaborate arrangements to leave their old lives behind, to purchase necessities for settlement on the African frontier, and transport or dispose of all their belongings.24 Mecklenburg assumed personal responsibility for overseeing the colonization program’s funding, which came from a special German state-sanctioned lottery he headed, the Colonial Charity Lottery. The fund provided a chest of money for colonial welfare. Renewing the program’s annual expenditure required extensive documentation, including a report on its effectiveness to the lottery funding committee. These reports identified the program’s beneficiaries and commented on how they had fared in the colony. The application for renewals motivated the Colonial Society’s ongoing requests for information about participants, which effectively made German officials in South West Africa responsible for tracing the recipients of the society’s subsidies and, if adults, detailing their current employment or marital status. Although the Colonial Society’s contracted servants technically could request return fares if they had not married, by 1903 only one servant applied for a return fare. Although that year’s report acknowledged the program’s limited success in increasing German settlement in South West Africa, Mecklenburg expressed optimism, seeking a renewal of 20,000 marks for further subsidies for women’s passages. He was confident that requests from settlers for their female relatives or

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servants from Germany would grow, and he commented that the funding remained “an important factor” for the promotion of settlement in South West Africa.25 In Germany, however, the public controversy over the emigration program persisted, particularly in the wake of Bebel’s allegations that most of the sponsored immigrants soon abandoned the colony. For example, in 1903 a German newspaper quoted a male settler in Windhoek who declared that the Colonial Society’s efforts to recruit brides for the colony had been an abject failure: “The matter was mishandled; they sent us seamstresses, store clerks, and city ladies, while our settlers need ‘milkmaids’ and peasant girls.” A lengthy article in the Colonial Society’s journal—“German Maids in Southwest-Africa”—countered these criticisms as inaccurate, proclaiming male colonists’ gratitude for program and heralding the participating women’s success in finding husbands. The article acknowledged, however, that between two to six of the servants had left the territory with their new husbands, either because one or both of the spouses could not bear the climate, or, in one case, because the husband had gone bankrupt.26

The Limited Demographic Impact of the Colonial Society’s Program Despite Mecklenburg’s optimism over the success of German women’s settlement, little demographic change is evident from the annual census for South West Africa through 1903, which was the last enumeration before the Herero and Nama Wars, which began in 1904. (Officials did not resume recordkeeping until 1907.) Through 1 January 1903 the number of the Colonial Society’s sponsored immigrants represented roughly one hundred women and girls. While the full colonial census tallied 670 adult white women in 1903, excluding sponsored men and girls, known out-migrations, and untraceable women who may have left the territory permits the estimate that roughly 10 to 14  percent of the colony’s white female population in 1903 had arrived through the society’s subsidies. Therefore, the overwhelming majority of white women had settled in South West Africa without the society’s assistance. Still, some historians have argued that the program played a key part in supplementing direct German state efforts at encouraging German men with limited means to homestead in South West Africa by offering the added inducement of free passages for their brides and other family members. Census records from South West Africa do show a growth of 86 percent of its white population (from 2,499 to 4,640 persons) between 1898 and 1903, although the adult sex ratio skewed around 80 percent male.27 After 1901 the German colonial administration strategically offered German state subsidies and land grants intended to raise the German settler population in South West Africa, as new colonial director Oscar Wilhelm Stübel sought to prioritize settler colonialism. In 1901 and 1902 the German colonial budget allocated

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additional 100,000 marks for grants of 4,000 marks or less to assist the settlement of discharged colonial troops who lacked capital. (Readers will recall veterans benefits to discharged protectorate forces in South West Africa was to have included free travel subsidies for their German brides, but colonial budgets never allocated funds.) These extensive new moneys helped twenty-eight veterans purchase of livestock, materials, supplies, machinery, and procure other agricultural essentials to start up homesteads. By 1903 the annual budget for this program expanded its funding to 300,000 marks, of which 100,000 marks was allocated to establish a new office of settlement commissioner. Stübel appointed the noted colonial advocate, scholar, and writer Paul Rohrbach to the post, a known supporter of women’s colonization, and charged him with drawing up official plans to increase German settlement.28 One reason for the rapid white population growth in South West Africa during this period was the completion of the colony’s main railroad line from Swakopmund to Windhoek in 1902, which may have made farming more profitable in the north. In addition, a temporary influx of two hundred to three hundred Afrikaner families from Cape Colony who sought to escape civilian internment during the second Anglo-Afrikaner War (1899–1902) raised the white population, but also the risk that non-German settlers would predominate in the territory. In 1898 a full 88  percent of the colony’s white population was ethnically German, but in 1903 only 65 percent were (2,998 of 4,640).29 After the number of Afrikaner immigrants became apparent, German colonialists successfully won the expansion of state moneys to boost subsidized German settlement to maintain a German majority within the territory. Though Afrikaners had long familiarity with the territory and its agriculture, many Germans disparaged them as ignorant Boers, alleging they were racially hybrid, uncivilized, migratory, and poor.30 The German administration sought to exclude the most economically marginal Afrikaners seeking immigration, and exerted futile efforts to naturalize those Afrikaners admitted through the mandatory use of German in the schools, compulsory military service for all settler men, and public German nationalist festivals, such as the celebration of the kaiser’s birthday. Nonetheless, by 1903 most of these recently arrived Afrikaner families had withdrawn from the colony, depressing the territory’s white female population.31 German colonial administration expanded its financial aid to German men, especially for retiring protectorate soldiers to become homesteaders. As German men’s settlement expanded, contemporary observers cited census figures of the growing white, male population as evidence the Colonial Society’s private program to promote German women’s colonization was too limited to redress the sex imbalance in the territory. Colonialist advocate M.R. Gerstenhauer strongly advocated that the German state fund more-expansive efforts to remedy the woman shortage in South West Africa, pointing to Cape Colony’s offer of direct state subsidies for English settler women following the Second Afrikaner War, explicitly as a pro-

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natalist means of equalizing the rebellious Afrikaner majority: “England has already enacted its plan, . . . now that the private activism of the German Colonial Society has proven itself unsuccessful, the [German government] must pursue the settlement of women and persist until a healthy relationship between the number of male and female white residents is reached, to spare Germany from a mestizo colony.”32 Despite Gerstenhauer’s dire predictions for the racially hybrid future of the German colony, direct state funding for German women’s colonization did not follow. The final prewar census records in 1903 revealed that the number of white settler men whose primary occupation was farmer or smallholder increased by 127 over the previous year, a sign of expanding German homesteading, with only a comparatively disappointing total gain of 37 white women.33

Subsidized Settlement and the Coming of the Wars As the census counts makes clear, most German settlers in South West Africa were not homesteaders. Even the majority of veterans settling in the territory by 1904 were rather paid farmworkers or craftsmen.34 A number of white men also worked as small-time traders, who worsened whites’ adversarial relations with Africans in numerous cases by luring local African clients into debt in exchange for impulse purchases like alcohol, and then confiscating their cattle as repayment. When Leutwein’s administration intervened to limit the private lending of credit to Africans in mid-1903, many Germans suddenly called in all these debts at once, aggravating these conflicts. The pastoral Herero had been especially desperate to borrow cash because an outbreak of the highly infectious cattle disease rinderpest in 1897 wiped out as many as 90 to 95 percent of native herds and pressured the Herero and Nama to sell off the pastureland that offered the best access to water. Once homesteaders had grabbed much of the preferred land in Herero territory, especially along the new railroad line from Swakopmund to Windhoek, they began making heavy inroads in Nama lands to the south, which had the largest existing Afrikaner and Rehoboth Baster populations. White settlers’ land expropriations were so extensive that Leutwein’s administration began to negotiate the boundaries for a Herero land reserve in the district of Okahandja in May 1903. Historians typically cite Herero rejection of the proposed reserve’s boundaries, their extensive losses of cattle and land, their disputes with settlers over debts, and their resentment of whites’ mistreatment and abuses as the main causes of the uprising that soon broke out.35 Arguably, women’s settlement in the frontier zones also compounded the already tense situation by demonstrating to Africans that German homesteaders intended permanent occupation of their traditional lands. Still, most (81) of the of the approximately 150 women and girls sponsored through 1904 lived in the largest towns of Windhoek (including Klein-Windhoek), Swakopmund, and Lüderitzbucht. White-concentrated communities were less exposed to the initial fighting in

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the war, although residents there did not escape the war’s impact, especially since many of them had able-bodied German male family members who faced conscription. Records also show that nearly all of the sponsored women from the Colonial Society’s program resided either with employers or family members, rather than independently. A number of them—both married and unmarried—worked in small businesses such as stores, inns, bars, and restaurants. The wives, sisters, or other family members of prospective male settlers were likelier than former servants to found homesteads, and therefore most impacted by the Herero attacks. Despite the Colonial Society’s stated intention to sponsor women as prospective wives of German farmers, only about 15 of the original 150 women married farmers or small-holders. The majority of those who married had husbands who worked in towns; these husbands were lesser German colonial officials and soldiers, as well as innkeepers, merchants, and a variety of skilled workers, ranging from harness makers to carpenters, metalworkers, and builders. Since women applying for emigration subsidies as settlers’ fiancées (numbering 46) constituted the largest single category of the participating Colonial Society’s sponsored settlers, it is hardly surprising that 77 of the 150 new arrivals married while in the colony, and 35 more women were already married when they arrived. The African wars prevented at least a couple of these sponsored women from marrying, as two sponsored women arrived in the colony in 1904 only to discover that their fiancés had died in combat. Only a few unfortunate women (as well as two men) from the sponsored settler program appear on the German lists of victims of either Herero or Nama attacks.

The Herero War The Herero War broke out on 11 January 1904, while the Nama War began in early October 1904. The Herero first unleashed a wave of attacks against settler homesteads overnight between 11 and 12 January 1904 in the north, while the main contingents of German colonial troops were in the south restoring order against the Bondelswarts faction of Nama. Governor Leutwein’s office dispatched the local civil police to ride out and warn German homesteaders, and the majority quickly took refuge in area forts and mission stations. German forces in the town of Okahandja protected a number of German women and children against the Herero siege, which lasted several days. The German men killed in the Herero attacks on homesteads comprised forty-three farmers and their employees, thirty-seven traders and merchants, sixteen craftsmen, and twelve colonial soldiers. A further eight Afrikaner men were slain, as well as three white women. Casualty lists named eight additional white women as wounded or otherwise mistreated; some of these women may have been Afrikaners, too. As discussed below, combatant Herero also took a number of white women and children captive, but eventually released them unharmed. Attempting to reassert ownership over their former territory, the Her-

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ero destroyed many German farms located in the northern and central regions and appropriated settlers’ property, especially their cattle herds.36 Two women who settled with the Colonial Society’s assistance were caught up in this early wave of fighting. The first was Anna Hoffmann, who had arrived in South West Africa only about six months earlier with her two children from a previous marriage. She had arranged to marry the civil police officer Richard Tausendfreund, who owned Otjiseva Farm, outside of Windhoek. Tausendfreund rode out to warn German settlers of the Herero threat, but failed to evacuate his own home in time. Herero residing in a village near the farm slaughtered both him and his stepson, Karl Hoffmann. Hereros allegedly desecrated their bodies. The youth was among the youngest whites to be killed in the uprising. Tausendfreund, as a civil police officer, may have been a particular target because of his responsibility for administering discipline to Africans. The colonial newspaper, the Deutsch Südwest-Afrikanische Zeitung (German South West African Newspaper, Windhoek) decried the victimization of the women settlers and Tausendfreund’s stepson, “still only half a boy, murdered”—he was about fifteen years of age.37 The Herero held an estimated numerical advantage of seven thousand to eight thousand fighters against seven hundred and fifty German protectorate soldiers in early 1904. They executed many German settler men who did not evacuate, as well as German soldiers and police they encountered, but they did not storm the forts and mission stations where most white settlers took refuge. Although German men were the majority of the dead, Herero forces largely spared non-German settlers and missionaries as well as their white and biracial women partners and children. The SPD’s newspaper, Vorwärts (Forward), spoke out publicly against calls for brutal German reprisals against the Herero, noting their efforts to shield white women and children had saved many, and blaming German men’s sexual assaults for inciting Herero vengeance, “Now certain newspapers write about the atrocities of the Hereros, that they slaughtered the wives of settlers and castrated the men there. As to the latter, certain Herero did this to white men who have shamefully assaulted and despoiled their women and girls.”38 Though SPD newspaper decried reports of German atrocities against the Herero already filtering into Germany, colonialist propaganda highlighting the Herero’s victimization and emasculation of whites soon gained masses of sympathetic German readers. Settler wife Else Sonnenberg’s war memoir recounted in stark terms how Herero attacked her family shortly after she gave birth. Unlike most settlers, who anticipated the outbreak of violence and took refuge before fighting began, Sonnenberg and her husband refused to abandon their property. A high-born Herero with a history of bad relations executed her merchant husband while he slept, though a few Herero who were friendly to the family assisted her initial escape with her newborn infant son and the German nurse, Sister Marianne, who had attended her childbirth. Other Herero insurgents soon captured and held them for about six weeks with several other white hostages, but eventually released them to German soldiers.39

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Settler Rust’s war memoir recounted the experiences of Marie Zülchner Külbel, a former servant who had arrived in South West Africa with the first Colonial Society transport. Like Sonnenberg, she was listed as missing and presumed dead for a time, during which she and her child were Herero prisoners. As a young servant hailing from Dresden, she had remained unmarried for nearly two years after arriving in Windhoek, first working as a maid for a pastor and later employed in a merchant’s shop, before marrying the farmer and trader Ernst Külbel. She likely had substantial savings from her employment by November 1900, which may have helped finance the couple’s relocation to a remote farm in Otjituezu. She took part in heavy fighting defending her farm, and witnessed Herero soldiers execute her husband. Most women widowed in the war left the colony, including Anna Tausendfreund and Else Sonnenberg, as well as a couple of the other fiancées and wives of fallen soldiers. However, the widowed Marie Zülchner Külbel remained in South West Africa, although she left her destroyed former farm to resettle in the modest garden enclave of Klein Windhoek when she remarried.40 Külbel fought alongside her husband in defending their farmhouse, and Conrad Rust’s account depicts her as protectively maternal rather than unfeminine. In German war propaganda, Herero women, who sang behind the lines in support of their male fighters, figured as violent, bestial Amazons. Rust further relates how fellow German farmers stopped to warn the Külbels of impending attack from nearing Herero forces. While the couple gathered some belongings, Herero soldiers shot at their farmhouse from heavy cover, and Ernst and Marie Külbel both took up rifles to fire back defensively from different rooms until darkness fell. After a harrowing night, the family fled at daybreak after Herero troops decided to burn them out. Ernst and Marie leapt out of windows with rifles in hand to escape an incendiary blaze, and ran while she carried her child in her arms. She took a graze to her right temple and then a shot to her right shoulder before Herero forces surrounded them and killed her husband at point blank range. In Rust’s account, the attacking Herero soldier band included a former servant, Thomas, who threatened her life with a pistol because he claimed her husband once had boxed his ears while she watched. More likely the threat came because Kübel’s active role in the fray had jeopardized her status with the Herero band as a noncombatant, which could have cost her life. After conferring, however, Herero elder Paulus instead delivered her and her child safely to nearby missionaries.41

The German Conduct of War German settlers were outraged and traumatized by Herero attacks, which they represented as unprovoked murders. Although many of the colonists claimed that the Herero conduct of war—in particular the sudden and unannounced initiation of fighting against civilians—was dishonorable, male settlers and colonial troops countered with excessive, even brutal force. For example, in numerous instances

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German soldiers summarily executed captured Africans as spies, and deputized men in settler patrols often shot indiscriminately at all Africans they encountered, whether or not they belonged to combatant ethnolinguistic groups. Recent scholarship portrays the German partisans as consciously engaged in a race war against all Africans in the territory, rather than limiting their revenge to the Herero, or later the Nama. Paranoia and helplessness pervaded the German side, as their greatly outnumbered colonial troops mustered to protect them. Under Leutwein’s command, German fighters initially used whatever means they deemed necessary to eliminate not only the warring factions but also Africans’ way of life. Unlike the Herero, German forces did not spare unarmed individuals or weaker segments of the Herero population, including the elderly, women, and children.42 In the first half of 1904, paramount Herero chief Samuel Maherero led a force of between six thousand and eight thousand fighting men. Early engagements remained inconclusive, and deaths from typhus and combat were heavy on both sides. In all, German officials reported 2,348 German casualties; soldiers died in battle or of disease, or were missing or wounded by the war’s official end in 1907. Many male settlers joined the fighting as reservists or enlistees, a number of whom died while in military service. Apart from a single battalion of German marines diverted to the fray, the first sizeable reinforcements from Germany landed only in June. Their new commander in chief, Lothar von Trotha, replaced Leutwein in July. Under Trotha’s command, the war quickly escalated into the most costly and brutal war in the history of Germany’s colonial empire, resulting in the mass slaughter of the Herero population. At the Battle of Waterberg (Battle of Ohamakari) in August 1904, Trotha deliberately ordered the encirclement of the largest center of Herero population with machine guns. Their only escape route was the desert. Under orders to take no prisoners, German forces not only shot at fleeing Herero soldiers, but also civilians including women, the elderly, and children, driving many of the Herero and their cattle into the middle of the desert where most were condemned to die of thirst. The German government in Berlin subsequently repudiated Trotha’s so-called extermination order against Herero survivors, and constructed camps for prisoners after the tremendous loss of life was apparent. The German prison camps’ appalling conditions led to still further deaths.43 Out of a prewar population of eighty thousand to a hundred thousand, an estimated sixty-five thousand fell, about four-fifths of the Herero population; the remainder endured harsh German imprisonment unless they managed to escape through to the unregulated Northern Ovamboland territory or survived the harsh desert trek into to neighboring colonies.44

The Nama War Following the defeat of the Herero, German officials sharply curtailed all Africans’ rights throughout South West Africa. Fearing the loss of their own tribal culture

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and lands, many of the Nama political groupings in the colony’s south began to prepare for battle, including the Bondelswarts faction, which had been restive since late 1903. Witbooi warriors under the leadership of the famed captain Hendrik Witbooi amassed, and by October 1904 the majority of the other Nama groups joined in a general uprising. Most scholars now contend that the Nama attacks on white homesteads again spared settler women and children, and Nama soldiers even helped a number to reach safety. As in the Herero revolt, German troops rode out to warn white homesteaders, and the majority of whites fled to fortified areas. About thirty-five German soldiers and white settlers died in the initial Nama attack. (This is many fewer deaths than in Herero raids, yet more of the Colonial Society’s sponsored settlers were caught up in the attacks.) Again, German police and soldiers rode to isolated homesteads to warn settlers but they never reached Farm Nomtsas, a company-owned sheep farm in the Maltahöhe area, which was the only holding in the district that failed to withstand the attack. Hendrick Witbooi’s troops killed all of the five white inhabitants, including the oldest settler in the colony as well as female employee Clara Bräuer, the lone sponsored female migrant among the Germans killed in the wars and one of only a handful of white women who died in the Herero and Nama uprisings. She was survived in the colony by her brother and sister-in-law. Namas also felled a Krieß brother at his isolated homestead, one of the few sponsored settler men. In addition, three sponsored settler women were among those taken captive after witnessing Nama bands slay their male family members in the October attacks: Emma Piepenburg Hittcher and Bertha Voigt Friccus lost their husbands, while Else Wieprecht lost her brother. All three returned to Germany.45 In 1909 Kaiser Wilhelm II honored Hittcher for resourcefulness in surviving her Nama captors. As she later shared in a published interview, her own version of the events seemed more an ordeal than a heroic victory. She related that she and her husband, a civil police officer, transferred to Gochas six months before the Nama uprising to guard the missionary station, with two African soldiers under his command. The Hittchers were among only a handful of whites in Gochas, which was the home of about two hundred Nama under the leadership of Simon Kopper. In the first days of the Nama War, Kopper’s forces shot and killed Fritz Hittcher while he oversaw workers digging a well. Emma Hittcher, alone in the house, was unaware of the violence until Nama soldiers came to her door to announce her husband’s death, after which she fled to the neighboring mission station: Not far from the house lay my dear husband in his own blood. Now began the plundering. Nothing escaped the yellow devils; the bed was cut up, the feathers scattered, the furniture strewn, shortly all was destroyed or stolen, my cows driven away, and most importantly, the weapons and bullets carried off. .  .  .  I was covered everywhere with stains of my husband’s blood. Meanwhile, a Fräulein Wieprecht came to us, having fled her brother’s farm. While they killed her brother, she

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had been lashed to the doorpost with straps around her neck and had to watch her poor brother lose his life. The barely eighteen-year-old young thing came to us helpless and exhausted. We three women and the five children of the missionary were exposed to the enemy in the isolated mission station.46 Hittcher praised her loyal Nama maid, Dorothee, who rescued and returned the family photographs and other personal possessions. Eight days after the attack, Kopper ordered the women to leave the mission station because he could no longer protect them. The children, Wieprecht, and their loyal servants had to walk in the heat, while Frau Berger gave birth to a girl inside an oxen-drawn wagon, attended by Hittcher. Finally, their Nama escorts brought the women and children to another abandoned German farm and left them, though the women kept watch against other armed Africans remaining in the area. Wieprecht eventually rode on horseback for eight hours to summon German military aid to evacuate them to the German stronghold in Gibeon. During their flight, Hittcher described taking cover for three hours behind a sand dune as a battle surrounded them. Hittcher

Figure 2.2. “Hinrichtung aufrührerischer Mörder in Gibeon,” (“Hangings of rebel murderers in Gibeon”) from Sam Cohen postcard collection, “Kreuz und quer durch SWA [Südwestafrika]” (“Out and About in SWA [South West Africa”]) The execution of Nama prisoners in Gibeon for killing white settlers. The image is one of many from the war showing German military forces’ summary hangings of African prisoners. https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frank furt.de/kolonialesbildarchiv/content/titleinfo/11356944 Courtesy of the Colonial Picture Archive, University Library of Frankfurt/Main: urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-786954.

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later claimed she and Wieprecht had to face down “lustful fellows,” but claimed “respect for the white women hindered the worst”—meaning rape, although they suffered many other physical discomforts and indignities during their captivity.47 Her memoir, like Sonnenberg’s, offers a one-sided view that does little to shed light on Africans’ motives, either for the violent acts against some whites or for assisting others. The town of Gibeon successfully staved off a Nama siege. The town had 614 white residents by 1903, and the majority of the white homesteaders throughout the district also evacuated there in time, including 175 white women and children.48 Though only a minority of German homesteaders who had been either unwilling or unable to evacuate had died violently, few German settlers were immune to the horrific trauma of the war. Many white settlers lost all their property, still more volunteers died in military skirmishes, and many whites sickened and died from a wartime typhus outbreak in late 1904. Still, I argue that sponsored settlers were overrepresented among those most affected: at most, sponsored settler women represent 108 of the 670 white women enumerated in the 1903 census, yet Clara Bräuer, the victim of a Nama attack, was one of only a handful (about four) white women documented as killed in both wars. (I could not find a published list of settler casualties from the Nama War.) In addition, the percentage of sponsored settlers (about twenty) who lost family members, or were wounded or held captive also seems excessive, though it is attributable to subsidized settlement grants for complete families, particularly the Krießes. German settler leaders voiced their collective outrage at the warring Africans, but also cast the blame for the war on the German colonial administration in provoking Africans, particularly through the planned imposition of reservations.

The Alleged Martyrdom of German Settler Women While the German population experienced only a fraction of the violence that the Herero and Nama suffered, German women’s alleged victimization became a powerful unifying symbol for German settlers as well as for Germans in the homeland. As one ardent German patriot proclaimed, “The defilement of our daughters cries out for vengeance.”49 Perhaps ironically, given the Colonial Society’s laissez-faire attitude toward the welfare of its sponsored settlers, the organization now made the well-being of war widows and orphans of settlers its special concern, collecting more than 285,000 marks in a public charity campaign to aid needy colonists. The Colonial Society also successfully lobbied the Reichstag to offer generous reparations for settlers’ war losses. The Colonial Society did not identify which of their sponsored settler women had suffered in the wars, though the majority seem to have been with the many white women and children evacuated safely to the colony’s forts and larger towns.50

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In late 1904 a group of prominent German settlers published their demands for full state reparations for all settler property losses from the Herero War, accusing the German colonial administration of negligence and blaming incompetent German officials for their provocation of the Africans to bloodshed. They claimed the Herero’s violence against every German they encountered, including “the gruesome slaughter of white women and children” was proof that the Herero were driven by political hatred of the German colonial administration rather than anger at individual Germans. They reminded the German government that it was complicit in encouraging and supporting the German women’s settlement which placed them in harm’s way. They further noted that their losses had mounted because German settler men had been forced to evacuate their farms to serve in the military campaign against the Herero, forcing them to leave their possessions exposed to Africans’ plunder and destruction. The settler leaders concluded their demands for full property restitution by underscoring that the Herero War was not a natural event: “It was the failure to provide adequate protection to the settlers that the German Empire had promised and guaranteed.”51 Their restitution claims too conveniently blamed the German colonial administration for the war, yet their observation held a measure of truth that Germany had recruited German settlers to South West Africa and then failed to secure their welfare.

Postwar White Reconstruction Not surprisingly, the controversy in South West Africa over racial mixing continued after the Herero and Nama wars, including a number of advocates who called for the expansion of German women’s settlement to discourage settler men from interracial unions. Still other settlers requested that the Colonial Society resume recruiting and sending single women from the homeland to fill the need for more servants in South West Africa. In the words of one Colonial Society member in Bochum in February 1904, soon after news of the Herero uprising rocked Germany, “Finally, I ask you to set your sights on shipping more marriageable girls to Southwest Africa. If Deputy Bebel announces something about it in the Reichstag now, it can be irrelevant to us, as the actions of our organization have moved the country to great sympathy.”52 In short, German colonialists seized on the opportunity that the Herero and Nama Wars provoked to pressure the Colonial Society to renew the drive to recruit unmarried women’s settlement for racial ends. Radical German colonialists alleged these wars signaled the opening of a broad race war between whites and blacks in South West Africa, which necessitated an end to all racial mixing in the colony. The colonialist press in Germany even published a spate of articles questioning the legal status of mixed-race individuals, applauding the Southwest African ban on interracial marriages, and calling for amendments to the German constitution to void intermarriage between the races.

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The populist nationalist daily, the Berlin Daily Review, offered a racial propaganda piece based on analysis of the Colonial Society’s journals, the German Colonial Newspaper and the Zeitschrift für Kolonialpolitik, Kolonialrecht, und Kolonialwirtschaft (Journal for Colonial Politics, Colonial Law, and Colonial Business), which concluded that German male colonists’ failure to uphold the white race, especially their interracial marriages, had helped cause the African uprisings. The article predicted the colonial wars finally would strengthen Germans’ racial consciousness against their African adversaries, while “the increased settlement of German girls and women in the colonies” would help keep the races separate. German radical nationalists now spread the word among the Wilhelmine public that German women’s settlement was needed in the existential struggle between the races. Arguably, then, the wartime propaganda against race-mixing in the colony helped end the impasse against sponsored servant women’s settlement in Africa.53 German settlers’ applications for white servants also made clear they also wanted these women as inexpensive domestic labor. Even as the war raged on in October 1904, Germans in Swakopmund contacted the Colonial Society with eight new requests for servants from Germany. As Dr. Fuchs, head of the regional administration in the city remarked, “As soon as peace and order reign in the country again, the shortage of female personnel that already is very apparent here will likewise come to the fore in the inner parts of the territory, and with it, such women and girls who may not comfortable in their service positions in Swakopmund will have ample opportunities to change them.” Despite their requests, the Colonial Society’s leadership insisted that all prospective employers would have to continue choosing their own domestic servants, since recruiting maids had proven too controversial in the past.54

Breaking the Impasse In late 1905, as the former deputy governor of South West Africa Friedrich von Lindequist prepared to assume the civil governor’s office, he hoped that the Colonial Society would reconsider its blanket refusal to recruit servants, by “housing a number of German maids in suitable families” as prospective brides. He based his scheme explicitly on the intermarriage ban of October 1905, through a follow-up circular directing district officials to encourage German settler men who were married or engaged to request Colonial Society subsidies for their wives and brides to emigrate from Germany and to urge local settler families to apply for transport subsidies for German servant women. He remarked that settler men’s “mixedrace unions, which threaten the Germanness of the colony, should be prevented as much as possible . . . and so there must be efforts of by colonial authorities to enable and facilitate ties to German girls,” and asked his underlings to identify

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families in their districts who would hire maids from Germany.55 He forwarded the list of prospective employers to the Colonial Society in May 1906, urging them once again to select a cadre of German maids for settlement in South West Africa. He advised the society to choose the candidates very carefully from “girls from rural backgrounds wherever possible, who have led a morally unblemished life, know how to run a simple home, are frugal, and do not shy away from rough labor.” One of his underlings noted that some previous recruits had been “ladies of quite loose morals.”56 Through January 1906 the Colonial Society continued to deny news reports that the society planned to recruit another group of new servants for South West Africa, rather than requiring the colonists to advertise and hire their own domestics in Germany. In July Colonial Society president Mecklenburg personally conveyed his concession to Governor von Lindequist’s overtures. This time, however, he explained that the society planned to conduct a stealth recruitment campaign: there would be no advertising for applicants and no publicity for the transports. In addition, the new arrivals would travel from Germany in small groups to avoid attention. To further avoid controversy, Mecklenburg privately requested the help of a familiar female colonialist in the selection process; he approached Frau Dr. Ludwiga Lehr, chair of the German Women’s Association for Nursing in the Colonies, who had worked closely with Mecklenburg as a board member of the society’s Charity Lottery fund. To the society’s further advantage, the Woermann steamship line further discounted its special rate for third-class passage to South West Africa to 150 marks from 250 marks. Mecklenburg instructed Lehr to meet with the selected girls and judge their housekeeping abilities, further stipulating that only she and not her organization would be involved in the matter, thus keeping the program from public view and also maintaining the Colonial Society’s exclusive control over its administration.57 Nonetheless, Mecklenburg’s underhandedness failed to conceal the project. And once again, the SPD objected to the society’s recruitment efforts, as the party’s papers throughout Germany carried Bebel’s syndicated editorial with the lurid headline, “Girls, Be on Guard!” Bebel reminded readers of his past confrontations over the Colonial Society’s servant-settlement program, decrying their “trafficking in women [Mädchenhandel] more or less under the flag of the government.” He hinted at the society’s renewed plans to ship another sixty new emigrant maids to South West Africa. This time, the evasiveness of the Colonial Society itself became a target: “Since . . . we have cause to suspect not unobjectionable manipulations behind the story, and so long as the government will not give its guarantee that these suspicions have no foundation, and above all, so long as the fate of past emigrants remains covered in a veil of silence, so long is great distrust is the best weapon against meeting misfortune. Girls, be careful!”58 Bebel’s article reprised many of the old allegations against the society’s work and linked their base intentions to the

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exploitative German state. Although his accusations elicited considerable concern from Colonial Society members around Germany, the country’s political climate had changed, and the society stood fast in its renewed plan to recruit unmarried servant women. Expanded German women’s settlement would soon contribute to the colony’s postwar reconstruction and growth.

The Propaganda War on the Home Front Bebel was not alone in criticizing the resumption—and even intensification—of female colonization in South West Africa. The German colonial wars against the Herero and Nama and the Maji Maji War in East Africa also took heavy tolls in lives and money. The wars brought German colonialism to the attention of the Wilhelmine public and kindled strong patriotism among many Germans, but also provoked intensified and broadened debates about the German mismanagement of the colonies in the 1905–6 Reichstag session. A young and ambitious Center Party deputy Matthias Erzberger exposed a wide-ranging set of colonial scandals detailing the corruption, financial waste, incompetence, and brutality of the German imperial administration throughout its overseas territories. Among Erzberger’s complaints over South West Africa, he decried the administration’s sweetheart shipping contracts with the Woermann Line, the expenses of the Herero and Nama campaigns, and, above all, the German atrocities against Africans. Erzberger’s campaign moved the Center Party, representing the majority of Germany’s Catholics, from its political stance within the ruling conservative coalition to join the German left as critics of empire. Though he did not fully share Bebel’s anticolonial views, their conservative opponents lumped them together as traitors to the nation and white race. In particular, their condemnation of the mass slaughter of the Herero and Nama in South West Africa infuriated many German settlers and their sympathizers in the homeland.59 The exposure of the colonial scandals in the Reichstag led to the resignation of Oscar Stübel as director of the foreign ministry’s Colonial Division; the ongoing furor also shortened the tenure of his temporary replacement, elderly former Colonial Society president Hohenlohe-Langenburg. In late 1906 Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow named Bernhard Dernburg to take over as head of the German colonial administration. Dernburg, a liberal Jewish banker with only limited colonial expertise, was charged with the difficult task of cleaning up the colonial administration. As part of the reform process, the chancellor elevated the Colonial Division to an independent cabinet ministry. Like his predecessors, Dernburg soon developed close ties with the Colonial Society.60 As Colonial Secretary, Dernburg immediately launched a series of reforms in the colonial administration, but did not succeed quickly enough to satisfy Erz-

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berger. When the German chancellor requested another 29 million marks for ongoing military action in South West Africa against the Nama guerilla campaigns, with a proposal to reduce active troops by April 1907, the Reichstag Budget Commission demanded further reductions and a shortened timetable for full withdrawal. Rather than accept these amendments, Bülow dissolved the Reichstag on 13 December 1906 and scheduled new elections for 25 January 1907. The public dubbed the bitter electoral campaign that followed the “Hottentot elections” (referring to a pejorative term for the Nama), in which partisan propaganda defined German colonialism as the key issue separating the parties. Nationalist electoral propaganda portrayed the SPD as the enemy of German settlers, and so of all patriotic Germans.61 A revealing election flyer depicted a German settler woman in the background praying for mercy as African marauders assaulted her husband and torched her family’s farm. The flyer underscored German women’s victimization in the war and warned of future African violence against German settlers if voters chose candidates from anticolonialist political parties instead of “loyal German” representatives. Such patriotic appeals to German voters in the 1907 electoral campaign sparked further debate over the role of the nation’s women in the colonies, which is the subject of the next chapter.

Conclusion The fierce propaganda battle championing German women as victims and calling on German voters as their patriotic protectors transformed the German public’s understanding of German women’s colonial roles. Over the past several years, SPD leader Bebel and his fellow colonial critics had decried the exploitation of German women settlers in South West Africa, politicizing the Colonial Society’s efforts as evidence of colonialists’ fanaticism. As this chapter has shown, Bebel’s concerns over German settler women’s welfare in South West Africa had created a political impasse for German colonialists eager to sponsor more settlement there. Historical evidence supports Bebel’s contentions that the Colonial Society and German colonial administration in the territory failed to secure current German settler women’s welfare. In South West Africa, sponsored unmarried white servant women sought to act autonomously in seeking marital and economic opportunities. Governor Leutwein and other officials reported that these women’s independence from white patriarchal control upset the gender order of the territory, leading to settlers’ outrage and gossip and so also leading to his cancelation of direct servant women’s colonization efforts by May 1900. Bebel’s exaggerated assertions of white women’s vulnerability in South West Africa are confirmed somewhat through newspaper documentation of white women’s suicides. District administrators’ reports on servant women’s welfare also hint

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at white, male violence and control over women. Historical evidence suggests that many German settler women in South West Africa not only faced harsh gossip and censure from fellow whites, but also endured broken relationships, illnesses, and economic insecurity. Despite the difficulties German women faced in South West Africa, and the abrupt returns of many of them to Germany, a number of the sponsored settler women successfully married and enjoyed upward mobility. However, those who married male homesteaders in South West Africa were exposed to danger in the African wars. Though they represented only a handful of the sponsored women, they faced disproportionate injuries, captivity, property losses and even death in the coming 1904 African wars in the territory. Misguided German state efforts to subsidize poor white men to homestead in isolated regions in South West Africa helped inflame racial tensions, as many aspiring white farmers with insufficient capital heavily exploited Africans and appropriated their pastureland and livestock. As Herero and Nama survival grew more tenuous, the German colonial state announced the imposition of native reservations in late 1903; the eruption of the Herero War followed quickly after in January 1904 and the Nama War broke out in October that year. Herero attacked and killed more than one hundred white settler men in early days of the fighting, and the Nama killed more than forty more. Many of the dead allegedly had histories of bad dealings with these Africans. Though Herero and Nama soldiers spared all but a handful of white women, German soldiers justified their overwhelming use of force against warring Africans as a chivalric defense of feminine victims. While a few German women received recognition for their contributions to the war, German nationalists and colonialists then capitalized on German women’s alleged victimization and African men’s defilement of them to rally the German public against the race war afoot in the territory. In South West Africa German troops and volunteers used shocking and brutal violence against Africans, perceiving all Africans as a threat to white survival in South West Africa. In the response to the imagined race war, German colonial officials restricted racial intermarriages through bans on white men’s marriages to black and biracial women, but also called for the rapid expansion of German women’s settlement in South West Africa as substitute brides. The Colonial Society had continued to subsidize women settlers to South West Africa throughout the Herero and Nama Wars, despite the potential danger. In Germany the patriotic popular upsurge in reaction to war broke Bebel’s political impasse against the socalled exploitation of German maids in Africa. Amidst the backdrop of war, in 1906 the Colonial Society again renewed efforts to promote German servant women’s settlement in South West Africa. However, the society was forced cooperate with the growing movement of German colonialist women in these efforts, as the next chapter details.

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Notes 1. Quoted from VdR 11 Mar. 1901, 1799. In the Protokoll der Kommission für den Reichshaushalts-Etat, 39. Sitzung, 7 Mar. 1901, Dr. Müller (Sagen) again inquired into the well-being of the female settlers. Regierungsrat Golinelli made a rather crude remark about breeding German children and horses in the territory. His statements elicited an objection about linking the two matters. Colonial director Dr. Stübel then reassured the committee that the Colonial Division of the foreign ministry was very much removed from the program, but both Müller and Bebel continued their criticisms. In addition, Bebel revealed that Prince Prosper von Arenberg, son of Franz von Arenberg, had been in military service in South West Africa, and had been convicted of killing a Rehoboth Baster man there. 2. Jens-Uwe Guettel, “The Myth of the Pro-Colonialist SPD: German Social Democracy and Imperialism before World War I,” Central European History 45, no. 3 (2012): 452–84; August Bebel, Die Frau und der Sozialismus (Zürich-Hottinge: Verlag der Volksbuchhandlung, 1879); available in English as Women and Socialism, trans. Meta Stern (Hebe) (New York: Socialist Literature Co., 1910). 3. Krüger, Kriegsbewältigung, 93–108; Krüger, “Bestien und Opfer,” 142–48. 4. On images of Herero and German women, see Krüger, “Bestien und Opfer,” 148–49. On German masculinity and settler violence in South West Africa, see Robert Gordon, “‘Little Kings’: Farmers’ ‘Erasive’ Practices in German South West Africa,” in Civilian-Driven Violence and the Genocide of Indigenous Peoples in Settler Societies, ed. Mohamed Adhikari (London: Routledge, 2019), 218-240, and Robert Gordon and Stuart Sholto Douglas, The Bushman Myth: The Making of a Namibian Underclass, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 53–55, describes banditry and other forms of resistance. Wilfried Westphal, Geschichte der deutschen Kolonien (1984. Reprint. Bindlach: Gondrom Verlag, 1991), 178 estimates about ten thousand Nama died, half the prewar population. Simon Kopper’s forces continued incursions from Bechuanaland, as discussed in Werner Hillebrecht, “Der Nama und der Krieg im Süden,” in Zimmerer and Zeller, Volkermord, 121–33. 5. On the German conduct of the Herero and Nama Wars, see Bley, South-West Africa; Jonathan Bridgman, The Revolt of the Hereros (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Horst Drechsler, “Let Us Die Fighting”: The Struggle of the Herero and Nama against German Imperialism (London: Zed Press, 1980); Jan-Bart Gewald, Herero Heroes: A SocioPolitical History of the Herero of Namibia, 1890–1923 (Oxford: James Currey, 1999); Hull, Absolute Destruction; Krüger, Kriegsbewältigung; and Walter Nuhn, Sturm über Südwest: Der Hereroaufstand von 1904. Ein dusternes Kapitel der deutschen kolonialen Vergangenheit Namibias (Koblenz: Berned und Graefe, 1989). 6. DKG 174, 418-23, Leutwein, Windhoek to Colonial Society executive vice president Sachse, Berlin, 28 Dec. 1899 (Abschrift) and, and DKG 174, 431, Finance minister Pahl, to colonial government, Windhoek, 26 Dec. 1898 (Abschrift). 7. DKG 173, 130-32, quoted from Leutwein, Windhoek, to the Colonial Society, Berlin, 12 Mar. 1899, (131). 8. DKG 174, 104, colonial director von Buchka, Colonial Division of the foreign ministry in Berlin, to the Colonial Society, Berlin, 12 June 1899. 9. DKG 174, 54, executive Vice President Sachse, Colonial Society, Berlin, to Leutwein, Windhoek, 24 May 1899, seeks telegraphic confirmation from the governor that the Fall 1899 immigration of a group of maids should proceed according to the old contracts. 10. DKG 174, 442-45, The Colonial Society to Leutwein, 7 Apr. 1900 notes that his reports of servants’ marriages suggested vacancies existed for replacements, DKG 174, 434, Leutwein, Windhoek, responds negatively about the servants and again claims the need for servants has been covered to the Colonial Society, Berlin, 25 May 1900, see prior similar remarks Leutwein, Windhoek to Colonial Society, Berlin, 28 Dec. 1899 (DKG 174, 418).

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11. DKG 174, 442-45, Leutwein, Windhoek, to the Colonial Society, Berlin, 25 May 1900, Quote from 443. 12. Quote from DKG 174, 418, Leutwein, Windhoek, to the Colonial Society Berlin, 28 Dec. 1899. Announcement of cancellation in published letter from Leutwein in “Deutsche Mädchen in Deutsch-Südwestafrika,” DKZ 18, no. 40 (3 Oct. 1901), 390–91; see Erich Prager, Die Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, 1882–1907 (Berlin, Dietrich Reimer, 1908), 151; Oskar Hintrager, Südwestafrika in der deutschen Zeit. (Munich: Verlag Oldenbourg, 1956), 41–42, on the settlers’ negative opinion of the maids. 13. Hintrager, “Zur Rassenfrage,” 19. 14. See my article exploring settler men’s patriarchal rights, O’Donnell, “Poisonous Women”; Wildenthal, German Women, 80–82, also explores the power that German settler men exercised over colonial and white women; Daniel Walther, “Gender Construction and Settler Colonialism in German South West Africa, 1894–1914,” The Historian 66, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 1–18, concludes that German colonial patriarchy expressed a premodern, chivalrous form of German masculinity. 15. DKG 174, 442-45, Leutwein, Windhoek, to the Colonial Society, Berlin, 25 May 1900. 16. “Verzeichnis der zu Gross-u. Klein-Windhoek-Awis ansässigen Weissen (abgesehen von den Unteroffizieren und Mannschaften der Schutztruppe) nach dem Stande am 15 November 1900,” DSWAZ 2, no. 25 (6 Dec. 1900), Beilage. One bride and seven maids from Colonial Society emigration rolls appear on the register. Six were married, and one maid lived with her fiancé and child. Only one servant remained unmarried. 17. Quoted from Leutwein’s letter of 23 July 1901, published in “Deutsche Mädchen in Deutsch Südwestafrika,” 390; Her sister Margarethe was a bride in the first Colonial Society Transport. Margarethe’s husband, Ernst Guder, was a secretary in the Windhoek colonial administration. See the couple’s wedding announcement and birth announcement in WA 1, no. 16 (11 May 1899) and WA 2, no. 2 (17 Jan. 1900). Her death notice refers to the incident as an accident. WA 2, no. 22 (25 Oct. 1900). 18. Some other cases reported: on a Colonial Society-sponsored servant’s self-poisoning on ship, SZ 1, no. 1 (12 Dec. 1911). In March 1914 a doctor diagnosed another woman as a suicide after she jumped overboard (DSWA, L.II.k.2, Bd. 3, 193-95). 19. See “Aus dem Schutzgebiet. Aus Swakopmund,” DSWAZ 3, no. 22 (30 Oct. 1901). Winter does not appear on the Colonial Society’s passenger rolls. 20. Quoted from Leutwein’s letter published in “Deutsche Mädchen in Deutsch-Südwestafrika,” 390. 21. DKG 172, passim, Letters to the Colonial Society from reluctant emigrants: Bertha Patsche, Berlin, 11 Sept. 1898; sales clerk Martha Oederich, Hamburg, 1 July 1899; seamstress Johanna Hittcher, Königsberg, 22 Aug. 1899; Anna Büche, Nov. 1898, and others. A proposal by the Colonial Society’s chapter in Cassel to establish a fund of 100,000 marks to enable retiring German colonial soldiers to return to Germany and select brides, then return for permanent settlement, went nowhere (Colonial Society, General Assembly in Cassel to Leutwein, 18 June 1900, L.II.h.1, 38ff ). 22. DKG 171, 266 reverse to 267. Quoted from Fritz Krieß, Gibeon, to his family, 1 Sept. 1898. 23. Wolfram Hartmann, “Sexual Encounters and Their Implications on an Open and Closing Frontier: Central Namibia from the 1840s to 1905” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2002), 217–25 on settlers’ mail order brides and sexual relations with African and other women. He notes that scholars have little information on concubinage in this era because of the high rates of casualties in the war both for German men outside cities and for Herero women and children. 24. Applications and arrangements for passage comprise the bulk of the DKG files 172–75. 25. DKG 175, 79-80, from Mecklenburg’s 1903 letter to the administration of the Wohlfahrtslotterie, quote, 80. Roger Chickering, “Patriotic Societies and German Foreign Policy, 1890–

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26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

1914,” International History Review 1, no. 4 (1979): 470–89; Pierard, “German Colonial Society,” 96–99. See appendix for full table of population figures. German news article quoted and contested in “Deutsche Mädchen in Südwestafrika,” DKZ 20, no. 26 (25 June 1903): 260. The article also estimated the number who had left. Boge-Smidt, “Germania,” 403, table 1a; Prof. Th[eodor] Rehbock, Karlsrühe, “Die Besiedelung Deutsch-Südwestafrikas, (Unter Verantwortung des Schriftleiters), I,”DKZ 17 no. 38 (20 Sept. 1900): 437–39. Some fluctuation occurred because refugee Afrikaners fleeing the Second Afrikaner War temporarily increased the white female population. Walther, Creating Germans Abroad, 15–17. Appointed in 1901, Stübel was relieved of duty in 1905 due to the colonial scandals discussed below. On Rohrbach and his views on race, see Wildenthal, German Women, 99–100, and Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten, 53–55; “Staatliche Ansiedelungsbeihülfen im deutsch-südwestafrikanischen Schutzgebiete,” DKZ 14, no. 16 (18 Apr. 1901): 151. The Herero War broke out before Rohrbach could begin his efforts. Boge-Smidt, “Germania,” 403, table 1a. Rehbock, “Die Besiedelung Deutsch-Südwestafrikas. (Unter Verantwortung des Schriftleiters), II,” DKZ 17, no. 38 (20 Sept. 1900): 438. Robbie Aitken, Exclusion and Inclusion: Gradations of Whiteness and Socio-Economic Engineering in German Southwest Africa, 1884–1914 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 189–203. Contemporary discussions of the Afrikaner settlement include M.J. Stephan, Warmbad, “Zur Besiedelungsfrage von Deutsch-Südwestafrika,” DKZ 18, no. 2 (10 Jan. 1901): 9–10; and M.R. Gerstenhauer, “Vom Deutschtum in Südwestafrika,” DKZ 19, no. 19 (8 May 1902): 182–83. Despite efforts to exclude Afrikaners by 1907, the civil population was only 69 percent German according to “Die weiße Bevölkerung des Schutzgebietes zu Beginn des Jahres 1907,” DSWAZ 9, 103 (25 Dec. 1907), 1. Quoted from M.R. Gerstenhauer, “Ansetzung deutscher Familien in Südwestafrika,” DKZ 19, no. 50 (11 Dec. 1902): 508. “Uebersicht über die weiße Bevölkerung Deutsch-Südwestafrikas,” DKZ 20 no. 37 (10 Sept. 1903): 372. The sources apply the term for “farmer,” but for the majority “rancher” is a more accurate description. Cecillie Swaisland, Servants and Gentlewomen to the Golden Land: The Emigration of Single Women from Britain to Southern Africa, 1820–1939 (Oxford: Berg, 1993). Kurt Eisfeld, “Schutztruppler siedeln in Südwest,” Online Magazine of the Traditionsverband ehemaliger Schutz- und Überseetruppen (no date). Available online: https://www.tradi tionsverband.de/download/pdf/schutztruppler.pdf (accessed Oct. 2020). Kaulich, Die Geschichte, 245; Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting, 113–19. Bley, South-West Africa, 134, disputes the economic causes in favor of colonists’ racism and mistreatment of Africans. Kurd Schwabe, Der Krieg in Südwestafrika, 1904–1906 (Berlin: C.A. Weller, 1906), 487–88, lists five white women killed, but Boge-Smidt, “Germania,” 142, notes Leutwein later confirmed only three. Memoirist Margarethe von Echenbrecker, Was Afrika mir gab und nahm: Erlebnisse einer deutschen Ansiedlerfrau in Südwestafrika (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler and Son, 1911), 204–8, describes a German patrol that accompanied her and her three children, along with a neighbor settler woman, to the fortified station at Omaruru, without knowing whether their husbands were safe. DKG 175, 81-82 reverse and 349-51, lists of sponsored settlers, 1900–1904. Hull, Absolute Destruction, 11, remarks that Germans probably misinterpreted the Hereros’ ritual dismemberment of enemy corpses as violence on the living. Quoted from an editorial disputing that the Herero had protected German women and children, including the death of Anna Tausendfreund’s son, Karl Hoffmann, “Für die weisse Farbe,” DSWAZ 6, no. 21 (19 Apr. 1904), 1. Neighbor Conrad Rust in his memoir, Krieg und Frieden im Hereroland: Aufzeichnungen aus dem Kriegsjahre 1904 (Leipzig: Kittler, 1905), 53–58, offers his account of five deaths at Farm Ojiseva, in which the “friendly” Herero camp turned on civil police officer Richard

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38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

48. 49.

50.

51.

52.

Tausendfreund and several other men, after Anna and her daughter evacuated to Rust’s farm. Richard Tausendfreund and his stepson had stayed behind to try to protect their livestock. When Tausendfreund realized attack was imminent he told his stepson Karl Hoffmann to flee the farmstead on horseback, but Herero captured and executed him outside the farm. A German patrol later came across his body, which had been castrated. Rust found the bodies of Tausendfreund and three other men with shattered skulls at the farm. He reported their corpses also were stripped, dismembered, and defiled, a euphemism for castrated. Rust editorialized in local newspapers, including those discussed in chapter 5. He was a Pan-Germanist who adamantly opposed awarding citizenship to “coloreds.” Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten, 236–37, discusses his background. The SPD newspaper article, “Die Währheit über den Herero-Aufstand,” Vorwärts 22 Mar. 1904, reprinted in “Rassegefühl,” DSWAZ 6, no. 18 (3 May 1904), 1–2. Else Sonnenberg, Wie es am Waterberg zuging. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Hereroaufstandes (Berlin: Dr. E. Th. Förster, 1905), 72–88. Rust, Krieg und Frieden, 81–85; Gewald, Herero Heroes; Krüger, “Bestien und Opfer,” 147. A mason and contractor named Rudolph was the husband of another sponsored maid, Ida Hille, and was one of twenty-four Germans killed at the Battle of Okahandja in January 1904. See “Verlustliste,” DSWAZ (9 Feb. 1904), 1. An unidentified German settler woman’s firsthand account of the siege of Okahandja and its aftermath appears in Anonymous, Aus Südwestafrika: Blätter aus dem Tagebuch einer deutschen Frau 1902–1904 (Leipzig: Veit, 1905), 145–75. Colonial Society records indicate that the sponsored migrant Anna Koal arrived only two weeks after her fiancé, the farm overseer and volunteer Oscar Bachmann, had died in a German skirmish against the Herero. Rust, Krieg und Frieden, 81–85. Krüger, “Bestien und Opfer,” 144; Krüger, Kriegsbewältigung, 57–62. Krüger, Kriegsbewältigung, 57–62. Westphal, Geschichte der Deutschen Kolonien, 177–78. Hintrager, Südwestafrika, 68; Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting, 184, disputes Hintrager’s claim that missionaries were killed in the Nama attack. Boge-Smidt, “Germania,” 350, fn 412; Martha Mamozai, Herrenmenschen. Frauen in deutschem Kolonialismus (1982), reissued as Schwarze Frau, weiße Herrin (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Tassenbuch Verlag, 1989), 152–53. The independent colonial journal KH published the Women’s League of the German Colonial Society’s newsletter, “Frauenschicksale in Südwest zur Zeit des großen Aufstandes. Erzählt nach eigenen Erlebnissen von Emma Dorn verw. Hittcher,” KH 6, no. 36 (1912–13): 4. “Frauenschicksale in Südwest zur Zeit des grossen Aufstandes, KH 6, no. 36 (1912–13): 5 and “Frauenschicksale in Südwest zur Zeit des grossen Aufstandes. Schluß,” KH 6, no. 37 (1912–13): 2. Rehbock, “Uebersicht über die weiße Bevölkerung,” 372. Hintrager, Südwestafrika, 68. The quotation is a line of verse, originally from the patriotic Romantic-era poem, “Aufruf ” by Karl Theodore Körner and quoted inspirationally in discussing the 1904 colonial wars in South West Africa in the article, Franz Richter “Die Frau und die Kolonien,” Zeitschrift für Kolonialpolitik, Kolonialrecht und Kolonialwirtschaft 7 (1905): 688. Prager, Die Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, 175, 190; Krüger, “Bestien und Opfer,” esp. 147–49. DKG 182, 229ff, Southwest African administration’s report on the sponsored migrants identifies widows and others impacted, 3 Mar. 1905. Ansiedler-Abordnung, Die Ursachen des Herero-Aufstandes und die Entschädigungsansprüche der Ansiedler (Berlin: Wilhelm Baensch, 1904), 9–16 (quotes from pages 10 and 16). The committee included Franz Erdmann, Otto Erhard, M. Kürsten, Carl Schlettwein, and Albert Voigts. DKG 175, 143, Excerpt of a letter from Held, Bochum to the Colonial Society, 12 Feb. 1904.

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53. “Die Rassenfrage in den Schutzgebieten,” Tägliche Rundschau 143, 25 Mar. 1904 clipping in RKA 5427, 62. The previously-mentioned German eugenicist, Philalethes Kuhn, “Wie bleibt Deutsch-Südwestafrika eine deutsche Kolonie?” Zeitung des Bundes Deutscher MilitärAnwärter 12, no. 3 (1 Feb. 1906): 34; and Richter, “Die Frau und die Kolonien,” which call for the resumption of German women’s settlement in the wake of the Herero and Nama Wars. 54. DKG 175, 154, Bezirksamtmann (district chief) Dr. Fuchs, Swakopmund, to the Colonial Society, Berlin, 14 Oct. 1904, Quote from page 154. A list of eight persons seeking servants accompanied the document. See also the Colonial Society’s reply, DKG 175, 179. 55. DKG 175, 286-87, Lindequist’s confidential circular to the district and independent divisional offices, 20 Oct. 1905. Quote from page 286 reverse. Follow-up, 20 Dec. 1905, NAN, DOK, Okahandja District, B. 10.1, n.p. 56. DKG 175, 285, Lindequist, Windhoek, 19 May 1906 to the Colonial Society, Berlin. Quote from page 285. Marked highly confidential; Criticism of the administrator on the former candidates quoted from Venghiattis, “Mobilizing,” 50. 57. DKG 175, 248, 257, 251, and 258. News clippings. Corrections to news reports sent to Berliner Blatt no. 25 (31 Jan. 1906), and two smaller papers. See the Colonial Society’s negative responses, 247/4, 258/1, 259. DSWA, L.II.k.1, Bd. 1, 97 and 98, Mecklenburg, Willigrad, to Lindequist, Windhoek, 31 July 1906. Colonial Society Vice President Theodor von Holleben to Lindequist, 25 Sept. 1906; DKG 190, 195, Colonial Society to Lehr, 3 Aug., 1906. 58. “Mädchen seid auf der Hut!” Vorwärts 12 Sept. 1906. Clippings of original and several syndicated copies, DKG 175, 299-308. 59. On the colonial scandals and the German elections of 1907, see Pierard, “German Colonial Society,” 294–300; Wildenthal, German Women, 137; John Philip Short, “Colonialism, War and the German Working Class: Popular Mobilization in the 1907 Reichstag Elections,” in Naranch and Eley, German Colonialism, 210–22; and Ulrich van der Heyden, “Die ‘Hottentottenwahlen,’” in Zimmerer and Zeller, Völkermord, 97–102. 60. Hohenlohe-Langenburg briefly occupied the colonial directorship after Stübel’s resignation. Dernburg subsequently served as the first head of the Colonial Department from 1906 until 1910, according to Lewis H. Gann and Peter Duignan, The Rulers of German Africa, 1884–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1977), 252. 61. van der Heyden, “Die ‘Hottentottenwahlen,” 99; text and image available online at https:// www.freiburg-postkolonial.de/Seiten/Heyden-Reichstagswahlen1907.htm (accessed Feb. 2022).

  CHAPTER 3

The Race War

As the previous chapter detailed, radical German colonialists depicted the Herero and Nama Wars in South West Africa from 1904 to 1907 as part of an intractable race war between whites and blacks. The violent German suppression of the colonial wars in Africa, including the Maji Maji War in German East Africa in 1905, as well as the Herero and Nama Wars in South West Africa, divided German critics and supporters. In the Reichstag the SPD and Center Party in particular decried these wars’ expenses and the German military’s carnage in suppressing colonial Africans. In the German election campaigns of 1907, radical nationalist German propaganda popularized colonialism among the masses and painted the critics on the left as traitors to the nation and race. As evidence below suggests, radial colonialists placed German feminists under suspicion as well. The German colonial wars also set the stage for the founding of a new women’s colonialist group in 1907, the Deutsch-Kolonialer Frauenbund or German Colonial Women’s League (hereafter Women’s League or league). This chapter explores how the white settler community in South West Africa, as well as many ardent German colonialists in the homeland, feared that German women’s increased involvement in colonial politics would undermine white settlers in waging their race war against Africans. The German colonial administration and German Colonial Society regarded themselves as the experts on the needs of South West African colonists and pressured the leadership of the new Women’s League to follow their directives, especially when the league disagreed over promoting working-class German women’s settlement to boost white pronatalism in South West Africa. Although German women could not vote or hold party membership, many German women did take a strong interest in the news of the colonial wars in Africa and their impact. A number of German women raised funds and actively participated to the patriotic war effort through efforts to bolster the nation’s troop morale, nurse its wounded soldiers, and commemorate its war dead. Patriotic women’s organizations, in particular, helped in nursing, and providing aid and comfort to the surviving settlers of South West Africa. German nationalists also recognized

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the heroic sacrifices and courage of German settler women in the uprisings, as well as the two German nurses from the German Women’s Association for Nursing in the Colonies who died of illness in South West Africa. Just as in other modern wars, German women’s wartime service established them as necessary, though not always equal, partners of men in German nationalist activism. Despite the restrictions on German women’s engagement in politics, patriotic women’s roles drew on established maternal and dynastic rituals of caring for the German nation, which reproduced a conservative gender order.1 As the previous chapter detailed, war propaganda in imperialist German newspapers and journals in the homeland energized the public’s racial hatred against insurgent Africans for their alleged savagery. Extremists particularly decried the prevalence of interracial unions and biracial births in South West Africa and other colonies as a source of ongoing racial danger to the German nation. They contended that winning the race war required mass German settlement to tame the South West African frontier and its insurgent black population. They urged the German soldiers who finished serving in the Herero and Nama campaigns to settle in South West Africa, and unmarried German women to emigrate as their future brides. Settler men dismissed German women’s domestic and cultural contributions to the development of the colonies as potentially dangerous for race relations, as articulated in a 1906 editorial in the German South West African Newspaper: “We are actually still in an open or secret state of war, and there is no more fatal error than failing to recognize this fact. The uprising should have opened our eyes. In these circumstances it is especially foolish to strengthen your enemy. Any cultural elevation of the natives strengthens the native race. . . . Women of the fatherland, keep your hands away from the native Africans, who you do not know and whose ways are foreign to you, and do not stand between the whites in the colonies and the natives, who must settle things for themselves.”2 The article’s author opposed a proposal that the Reichstag fund a network of schools in South West Africa in which German female teachers would “civilize” African pupils—especially girls—through lessons in literacy, handwork, and domesticity. The author, Alexander Kuhn, outlined his scheme in his book Zum Eingeborenenproblem in Deutsch-Südwestafrika. Ein Ruf an Deutschlands Frauen (On the Native Problem in German Southwest Africa. A Call to Germany’s Women) in 1905, in which he recommended that the German Women’s Association for Nursing in the Colonies administer the projected schools. He hoped to model them on the American Indian schools then active in the United States that notoriously suppressed Native American languages and cultures among pupils.3 Though Kuhn’s scheme never came to pass, his suggestions demonstrate that, while many German colonialists welcomed more-expansive roles for white women in Germany’s overseas empire, the more radical colonialists proclaimed the danger that these women’s efforts to impart maternal civilizing influences in South West Africa would weaken white settler men fighting the colonial race war. As more

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German women joined the colonialist movement and settled in South West Africa, would they cooperate with or undermine colonial extremists’ efforts to assert white pronatalism and population strength? This chapter details the deep tensions that roiled the Wilhelmine colonial movement after German clubwomen organized the Women’s League, but concludes that the Colonial Society and German colonial administrators pressured and manipulated the league’s leadership to cooperate with their pronatalist schemes in South West Africa, even where it undermined the league’s organizational autonomy and interests in projecting its own vision for increased bourgeois German women’s domestic and cultural colonization in Africa. The following narrative explores the formation of the Women’s League and its complicated relations with the German Colonial Society, including their cooperation in projects to settle white women in South West Africa to promote white pronatalism. The league struggled to fulfill a number of their pet projects, but eventually built a dormitory to house and train German servants in South West Africa and recruited hundreds more maids from Germany directly for work in white settlers’ home. As the narrative reveals, the league’s work served key racial and eugenic goals in South West Africa as German administrators and white settlers increasingly sought to discourage interracial unions.

Enlisting German Women in the Race War By 1905 even the recalcitrant German Colonial Society was forced to recognize Germany’s women as useful allies in the colonial wars in Africa. The Colonial Society’s journal rallied patriotic German women to support the society’s efforts for the colonies but also to oppose what the journal called the “weak and indecisive” colonial policies of German feminists. In the summer of 1906, despite the Colonial Society’s long reluctance to accept the aid of voluntary female administrators for its women’s settlement scheme, Mecklenburg nominated a reliably conservative and patriotic female ally, Ludwiga Lehr, chair of the German Women’s Association for Nursing in the Colonies to help vet female employees for positions in South West Africa.4 Another prominent figure among the German women activists supporting the colonial wars was the aristocratic officer’s wife, Baroness Adda von Liliencron. Liliencron dramatized and sentimentalized the German campaigns in South West Africa for German readers, though she never visited the territory herself. She rose to fame not only through her publications, but also by arranging for ceremonial send-offs for departing troops, letters and care packages for overseas forces, and welcome ceremonies for returning colonial soldiers. Indeed, when she published a collection of colonial soldiers’ letters and poems written to her, Reiterbriefe aus Südwest, she dedicated the work to Colonial Society president Mecklenburg.

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Liliencron’s reliably maternalist patriotism and deference to male authority won over the leaders of the Colonial Society.5 In the past, male colonialist leaders had been openly hostile to the most recognizable feminist figure on the colonial scene, Minna Cauer. Between 1898 and 1899 the Colonial Society and Governor Leutwein repeatedly rejected Cauer’s assistance toward promoting women’s settlement in South West Africa. Leutwein claimed that Cauer’s proposals to promote the settlement of middle-class white women—particularly feminists—in South West Africa would alienate settler men and undermine efforts to prevent race mixing in the colony. In 1907 Cauer again sought to organize liberal colonialists and moderate feminists to promote expanded bourgeois German women’s settlement, and approached the new Colonial Minister Bernhard Dernburg seeking his support, but he referred her to a newly founded German women’s colonial organization.6 In spring 1906 Adda von Liliencron joined with a number of her fellow German officers’ wives to become the leaders of a new patriotic women’s club for the colonies, effectively sidelining Cauer again. The newly founded colonial league for women took Colonial Society president Mecklenburg’s wife, Duchess Elisabeth, as its protectress, and Liliencron served as its first chair. The league’s founding statement explained their mission: “Now, that the native rebellions in Southwest Africa and East Africa have been put down, the moment has arrived when the German woman in the homeland can help with colonial efforts, namely with regard to the woman question, which here refers to the promotion of women’s settlement.”7 The league narrowly defined the woman question to signal a rejection of broader, feminist views of German women’s colonial roles. Historians have argued that Liliencron took on the unwanted burden of leadership in the Women’s League in part due to her revulsion over racial mixing in South West Africa, which she also regarded as a front for the larger colonial race war. Under Liliencron’s leadership, the league propagated propaganda claiming that Germany was engaged in enduring racial conflict in African colonies between whites and blacks, in which German women must play a decisive role. The league’s top leadership echelon also included a cadre of professional racial hygienists— many of them male—such as Philaletes Kuhn, who championed women’s settlement in South West Africa chiefly as a weapon against racial mixing. He concluded his treatise on medicine in South West Africa with the topic “Retaining the German Race,” remarking, “Every German who moves to Southwest Africa has the duty, above all, to protect his German essence [Volksthum], in the first degree by marrying a German woman.” Kuhn’s prominent position on the board, combined with the greater success of the Women’s League in reaching the masses through its programs and propaganda may have made them more successful in spreading populist-nationalist race-purity views to the German masses than the Colonial Society. Just as male race-purity experts pushed their pet ideas, many women in

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the league instead hoped to promote further middle-class women’s colonization to serve as self-sufficient settler women.8 This chapter highlights how severely the league compromised their support for middle-class women’s colonization by cooperating with those who sought to circumscribe German settler women as the servants of white race-purity and pronatalism in South West Africa. Over time, the Women’s League developed an expansionist vision of German women’s colonialism, which attracted a broad female base among the German middle classes, especially women who wanted to make greater cultural contributions to the colonies beyond women’s biological and reproductive roles. The more the league promoted extremist eugenics and racetheories, and worked to make those theories palatable to German women, the more they had to contend with the antifeminism and misogyny integral to such thinking. When race-purists reduced German women’s value to biological motherhood and devalued German women’s cultural and political contributions, they undermined the league’s efforts to validate German women’s own visions of colonialism, which they based on the assumption of their cultural superiority to Africans. The paradox of the league’s position paralleled the compromise of the German women on the right whose maternalist nationalism drew them to support National Socialism, although it ultimately meant subordinating their own goals and interests to serve Hitler’s program of eugenics, pronatalism, and racial extremism.9 Arguably, the racial extremism of German settlers in South West Africa increasingly focused the German colonial movement on race purity, and they regarded the male-dominated Colonial Society as more-reliable allies in their imagined race war than the Women’s League. The leading colonial paper, the German South West African Newspaper, at first voiced skepticism over the foundation a new Women’s League in Germany, editorializing that white settlers had little need for German women’s efforts: We have to admit that we can’t quite imagine what the new Women’s League actually wants to do. . . . [I]f the new group wants to work, according to its stated program, “to establish greater access for German woman now than before to promote the introduction of German character and German ways in the far-off lands,” that sounds fine for a pretty toast but—if the ladies will pardon—it is still only a figure of speech. If the economy of the colonies develops positively, then female settlement will increase. A new association can help little there. It could easily lead to a splintering of the current activism and promotion to the colonies, and that which already suffer: an overestimation of the importance that all such certainly well-intentioned associational efforts could have for the development of our colonies.10 The editor’s dismissive reaction to the league’s formation and German women’s potential cultural contributions to the colony were a troubling sign for the league’s

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future prospects. By 1913, however, the same newspaper sang a very different tune, as an article remarked with satisfaction that, after six years of existence the Women’s League had reached a membership of seventeen thousand, spread throughout the German Empire. Moreover, the article celebrated several of the league’s initiatives in the colony, including their establishment of a hostel for German women servants in the town of Keetmanshoop and a youth center in Lüderitzbucht. The editor regarded these efforts at sustaining German women’s settlement and child care as essential to preserving the strength of the white race in the territory, “Since the woman question in South West Africa has particular importance for preserving the purity of the white race, the practical actions of the Women’s League in the interest of our colony are to be welcomed most happily.”11 Though the league depicted its women’s hostel and youth center as German cultural institutions, the newspaper chiefly recognized their value for the racial and eugenic interests of the German settler population, demonstrating how South West African newspapers continued to spread radical views on race and eugenics as well as dismissing the significance of German women’s cultural impact on the colony.

German News in South West Africa The German South West African Newspaper was only one of several publishing in the territory after 1907; it provides an important source of Germans’ evolving attitudes about race relations in the territory. As the white settler population expanded rapidly after 1907, a variety of regional news publishers formed to reflect the increasing social diversity of the territory’s white population. The colony’s oldest paper, the Windhuker Anzeiger (Windhoek Advertiser), founded in 1898, became the German South West African Newspaper when it relocated to Swakopmund in 1901, allegedly to maintain journalistic independence from the German colonial government. Appearing twice weekly, the colony-wide paper grew weaker in stature as competing newspapers began to appear. Nonetheless, the Swakopmunder Zeitung (Swakopmund Newspaper), founded in 1911 to provide local coverage, had folded by 1912. Another more-successful competitor, the Windhoeker Zeitung (Windhoek Newspaper), had launched in 1904 but was renamed the Südwestbote (Southwest Herald) in 1911 in light of its editors’ ambitions for readership throughout the territory. The Windhoek Newspaper appeared three times per week. In the south the Lüderitzbuchter Zeitung (Lüderitzbucht Newspaper) began publishing in February 1909 as a weekly. In December 1910 the new twice-weekly colony-wide paper, Südwest (Southwest) started up in the same city. By 1911 each of the three major cities in the colony published at least one newspaper with circulation throughout the territory. Although mastheads proclaimed papers to be independent or without party affiliation (there were no active party machines in the colony) most served specific constituencies; for example, the Herald was best known as an advocate of

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farmers, and the Lüderitzbucht Newspaper had a reputation for promoting local diamond interests. By contrast to the major publications, the tiny Keetmanshoop Newspaper, which at first was only typewritten and published on ditto paper, was limited in circulation.12 As historical sources, these colonial newspapers offer a useful commentary on the contentious public attitudes among whites of different classes and regions in South West Africa. Moreover, since the newspapers reprinted news and propaganda from the German metropole, and vice versa, the press connected German settlers to the colonial movement in the homeland. In the period between 1907 and 1913 as a large influx of white settlers arrived, the colonial economy boomed. Colonial census figures indicate that between 1907 and 1913 the white male population in South West Africa doubled, while the numbers of white women and children roughly tripled. (See the census tables in the appendix.) The expanded white population far exceeded the tally of sponsored Colonial Society-program settlement, which accounted for 2,272 individuals by July 1914. (A survey of sponsored settlers from 1898 through 1910 completed in 1913 also indicated that as many as one in two of them were no longer in South West Africa.) Nonetheless, the exponential growth in white settlement, as well as striking increases in the birth and marriage rates in the colony, helped create the impression among whites in South West Africa that the Colonial Society and Women’s League were contributing to the white baby boom. As the population of white women surged in South West Africa, overseas Women’s League chapters formed in the larger towns. The emergence of local newspapers in these districts ensured publicity from the Women’s League reached whites throughout the entire territory as did information on local chapter activities in South West Africa, including guest lectures and other propaganda from German colonial experts. In addition to local newspaper coverage of the Women’s League, members of the also received a free mail subscription to the popular colonialist journal from Germany, Kolonie und Heimat (Colony and Home) which carried its newsletter.13 The league’s promotion of the journal was no doubt another important influence on South West African readers.

The League’s Role in Promoting German Women’s Settlement The pages of Colony and Home offered hints at growing tensions between the Colonial Society and Women’s League, thanks in part to their interdependence. About a year after the league began, in spring 1908 the leadership of the Colonial Society and the Women’s League agreed to partner. Though the league remained independent, its new name identified it as the Colonial Society’s women’s auxiliary—the Women’s League of the German Colonial Society. The Women’s League joined the Colonial Society as a constituent member. The Colonial Society already had held three of six seats on the league’s executive board, granting it

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considerable control over its sister organization, and it now sent three additional representatives to its assembly. Indications are that the league chair and other members of the board from the league soon began to resent—and resist—the Colonial Society’s domination. Both sides sometimes compared the increasingly rocky relationship to an unhappy marriage. At least one member of the all-male German Colonial Society board later compared the recalcitrant auxiliary to an unfaithful wife. Rivalry and ideological disagreements, including the society’s accusations of feminist leanings within the league further soured relations between the two groups.14 Over time, the league successfully competed with the Colonial Society for membership and donations as well as public recognition of their work. The German Women’s Association for Nursing in the Colonies, which was renamed Frauenverein vom Roten Kreuz für den Kolonien (Women’s Red Cross Association for the Colonies) in 1908 was another key rival. The Colonial Society relied on the Women’s League to recruit German women for domestic service overseas, after the organization’s previous efforts had collapsed in controversy. The Colonial Society soon devolved on the Women’s League all efforts to advertise, interview, and select prospective female employees from Germany for work in South West Africa. President Mecklenburg at first awarded only Liliencron personal and limited responsibility, but the project was too large for one person. The league’s main office in Berlin organized efforts to interview and select candidates to fill servant positions in the colony, though Mecklenburg still exercised his personal right to review and grant final approval for all recruits, to dictate the terms of servant contracts, and even to insist the Colonial Society arrange the steamship tickets. Mecklenburg did not even grant the league exclusive powers as the Colonial Society’s servant brokers for South West Africa; after his relations soured with the league in 1910, Mecklenburg began to cooperate with rival German women’s organizations that also recruited maids and other female employees to South West Africa.15 From the inception of the Colonial Society’s women’s settlement program, Mecklenburg and his fellow Colonial Society officers had rejected all cooperation with other organizations, including women’s groups. In Mecklenburg’s estimation, the Women’s League existed as a subsidiary to his organization to serve the narrow purpose of recruiting suitable German women workers for the Colonial Society to sponsor to South West Africa. As a result, he avoided sharing decision-making power or even credit with the Women’s League. The Berlin chapter of the league countered by proposing that the league should assume control of the entire German women’s colonization program, with annual funding from the Colonial Society. The league’s unsuccessful proposal at the general assembly of the Colonial Society in 1908, claimed that clubwomen’s efforts to assist German women’s colonization “constitutes the essential core of the womanly world, which, in the first rank, can only be performed in a competent and effective way by women.”16 Though the league lacked its own funding to pursue women’s colonization independently,

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Liliencron broke with established views and practices of the Colonial Society by stating in the league’s newsletter that South West Africa needed more women workers from cultivated and middle-class backgrounds; her words appeared in the popular magazine Colony and Home.17 In early 1908 Liliencron claimed that large numbers of genteel German women had applied to her organization for employment in Africa as teachers, governesses, or housewives’ helpers (Stützen der Hausfrau). The league’s propaganda idealized the role of middle-class German women in the colonies whose greater cultural refinements equipped them as bearers of German civilization and language for the colony, and particularly as wives and mothers in newly founded settler families. Established colonists in South West Africa were eager for additional domestic workers, but rejected pressure to employ these specialized servants from genteel backgrounds, especially at the significantly higher wages Liliencron claimed they deserved.18 When Liliencron began to select middle-class applicants for servant positions in South West African settler homes, she also demanded that the employers pay to upgrade these ladies from third-class to second-class ship passages, which they refused to do. Oscar Hintrager, the highest-ranking councilor in the Windhoek bureaucracy and a coauthor of the territory’s 1905 mixed-race marriage ban, spelled out the employers’ outright refusals and once again stressed the need for hardy women as colonial wives and mothers: With regard to the selection of maids, it has been repeatedly stressed that in general we do not yet need ladies here. Instead, [we need] strong, healthy, and simple girls from the country who have led respectable and irreproachably moral lives, understand how to manage a simple household, are frugal, and do not shy away from coarse labor. Such are the most suitable wives for our farmers, settlers, and artisans, who are simple people for the most part and must struggle for a secure existence through hard work. They also offer a guarantee for a strong and healthy younger generation which the colony needs.19 Hintrager delineated the colonial administration’s longstanding preference for selecting peasant girls as maids in unambiguous terms, underscoring that the chief objective of German women’s settlement was increased white reproduction in the colony. His language applied contemporary völkisch German racial and eugenic theories by suggesting that peasantry reflected the innate German character. Potential colonial employers also voiced their well-established suspicions against hiring ladies. Faced with this united opposition as well as the veto power of Mecklenburg over selections, the league was forced to return to recruiting general maids instead of middle-class servants.20 Similar eugenic influences permeated the German Colonial Society’s fundraising propaganda promoting a charitable maternity hospital for white women in Windhoek in 1906.

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White Maternity as an Imperialist Cause The Colonial Society spearheaded the campaign for donations to build a maternity hospital for white settler mothers, advertising that professional maternal care was a necessity for rebuilding the white population after the Herero and Nama Wars: In our oldest colony of South West Africa after the defeat of the native uprisings, we not only have to the duty to rebuild the economy with all our might, but the national conscience urgently and undeniably demands us to ensure the establishment of a stronger Deutschtum [Germandom] down there. The first requirement is that German settlers must be granted the possibility to marry a German girl. . . . Since the uprising, a second requirement, however, has gone unrecognized in wider circles, although it was already pressing even before the revolt. We must provide for the lonely German farmer, the officials in small outposts, the missionaries, and whoever else wants to found a family out there, far from obstetric help, an institution which will provide his wife expert aid in her hours of need.21 The Colonial Society’s mass fundraising broadsheet for the planned maternity hospital used militaristic language throughout, depicting the great danger that brave, young German women faced when they surrendered their bodies to the care of African midwives: “We can only free our German sisters who fight for our ways and culture on these advanced outposts if we offer them the opportunity to await their approaching hours of need by a doctor.” The medical advocates of the plan also played shamelessly on the sympathies of middle-class German women, asking them to imagine the hardships of childbirth without a doctor’s care, and juxtaposing modern German medical expertise with the alleged incompetence of African midwives.22 Widely held German stereotypes linking the blackness of Africans’ skin with dirt and disease allowed the head of the maternity hospital plan, Windhoek physician Dr. Max Bail, to assert the dangers of ignorant native medical practitioners in fundraising propaganda. He cited in particular the story of one African Weib (wench) whose success in attending several German women’s births he attributed to pure luck. He claimed that he arrived too late to save one unfortunate white settler woman after this primitive black healer’s rough manipulations damaged her uterus and fatally infected her with childbed fever.23 Placed against the backdrop of the Herero and Nama revolts, Bail’s depictions of African midwives’ unsanitary practices and medical ignorance pointed to their victimization of white women. He now directed the Wilhelmine public’s racial hostility and wartime fervor toward a practical campaign to save German women and babies in South West Africa. The dangers that Bail attributed to colonial childbirth practices expanded on whites’ fears of racial mixing in the colony, suggesting

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that settler women’s harmful bodily contact with Africans was a parallel threat to white reproduction. Naturally, neither Dr. Bail nor the German Colonial Society acknowledged that African maids also would attend white mothers in the new, segregated facility, although not as official medical staff. After all, Mecklenburg decried African midwives’ care of white mothers as the “greatest danger to life and health.”24 In these depictions the South West African race war surged forward with African women assuming the symbolic role of a racial menace, targeting helpless German mothers and newborns (rather than seducing and degrading white settler men). German male doctors figured as heroes in this literature through their rescue of these imperiled white mothers and babies. Readers will recall that a number of the German women who recounted experiences during the Herero and Nama uprisings were recent mothers or went into labor during their flights, instances that might have been prevented had there been a maternity hospital in Windhoek where they could await childbirth. The Colonial Society’s pronatalist propaganda favoring white settler families and placing medical control of colonial reproduction in the hands of heroic white male doctors is especially troubling in light of the extremely low birth rates among the captive African population of South West Africa. By 1907 the German colonial administration was enforcing a broad set of policies restricting Africans in camps, including harsh living conditions and forced labor, but also inadequate nutrition for many, which suppressed Herero and Nama women’s fertility. Contemporaries and some historians even have alleged the colony’s defeated Herero women deliberately waged a birth strike, while colonial officials enlisted white medical practitioners to uncover the causes of their fertility decline.25 The German campaign to build the Windhoek Elisabeth-Haus (Elisabeth House) maternity hospital not only glorified white pronatalism within the colony, but also served as a racial symbol in Germany. The cooperative philanthropic efforts of the German Colonial Society and Women’s League that championed the Elisabeth House and similar causes promoted a coherent nationalist vision of white reproduction that elevated the care of white colonial children and their mothers to a patriotic cause. In the colony German administrators also backed the founding of a maternity hospital in a number of very practical ways, but again maintained the useful public understanding that the project was a private endeavor. By April 1907 the Colonial Society had arranged the purchase of a large government-owned land parcel in a desirable and prominent Windhoek location at a discount price. The local managerial board called on the imperial governmentappointed architect to draw the blueprints. The building plans presumed the population of German mothers in the colony would continue to increase. The scale of the plan certainly far exceeded the requirements of the mere 256 white women then resident in Windhoek. Under Bail’s management, the facility proudly hoisted

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Figure 3.1. “Haifischinsel: Lager der gefangenen Herero und Hottentotten: gefangene Hereros” (“Shark Island Camp for Herero and Nama Prisoners: Captive Hereros”). An image of Herero internees at the notorious Shark Island Camp for Herero and Nama Prisoners of War. https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/kolonialesbildarchiv/content/titl einfo/11278595 Courtesy of the Colonial Picture Archive, University Library of Frankfurt/ Main: urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-781174.

the flag after each birth. The Elisabeth House could add beds to accommodate long-term growth in usage over several years, presuming the facility succeeded in drawing patients among the many poorer white settler women throughout the surrounding countryside. The hospital continued operation well beyond the era of German colonial rule.26

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Figure 3.2. “Deutsch-Südwest / Windhuk. Kinderstation am Elisabethhaus / - 34” (“German Southwest [Africa] / Windhoek. Children’s Ward at the Elisabeth House/ -34”). Pronatalist Colonial German propaganda image, undated photo of the Children’s Ward at the Elisabeth House. https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/kolonialesbildarchiv/content/ titleinfo/11486484 Courtesy of the Colonial Picture Archive, Goethe University Frankfurt/ Main Library: urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-708943

Throughout the planning stage, fundraising propaganda stressed that the maternity facility was explicitly to restrict its mission to obstetrical care for “for women of all classes of white descent.” White women with other noncontagious female illnesses could request admission as well, if room was available. Although the hospital even occasionally made provisions for impoverished, unwed German maids, it explicitly refused entry to all patients of color. Colonial Society and Women’s League chapters would need to conduct ongoing fundraising to subsidize the facility’s artificially low rates. A sliding-fee scale made admission to the Elisabeth House affordable for white women of diverse social origins, at 5 marks per day first class and 3 marks second class. Women’s League and Colonial Society chapters conducted ongoing fundraising in Germany so that the neediest patients could forgo payment altogether.27 Their fundraising campaigns continually affirmed the significance of white births in South West Africa through maternity care but did not squelch ongoing racial dissension in the colony. The administrators of the Elis-

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abeth House, by catering to whites exclusively denied equal medical care to otherwise respectable biracial settler wives and mothers. As the race war in South West Africa ground on, German census tallies showed the rapid rise of the white settler population. The sexual imbalance between white men and women tapered off somewhat, and white marriages and births rates rose. Official census reports for 1909 counted 1,826 adult white women in the colony for 8,010 men (a white adult population that was about 23  percent female and 77 percent male). By 1913 the protectorate forces had drawn down to only 1,819 men, while white women had immigrated in greater numbers each year. Census records for 1913 calculated the number of adult white women in the population at 3,058 and 8,530 white men (an adult sex ratio of 36  percent female versus 64 percent male). Settlers were aware of the whitening of the colonial population, as colonial newspapers such as the Lüderitzbucht Newspaper remarked in 1910: “Every moral-minded person must welcome with joy the fact that in the last few years so many [white] women have immigrated into the territory and are still immigrating.”28 As the number of white women grew, their use of the Elisabeth House expanded; by 1913 there were more than 3,242 white children under fifteen years of age in South West Africa.29

Clashing Worldviews While the Elisabeth House symbolically united white settler women throughout South West Africa across class lines, its emphasis on aiding indigent whites stood in obvious contrast to the Women’s League’s assertions of a class-based view of genteel German women as the ideal colonists. The league helped raise funds for the Elisabeth House, but also needed to support their own projects, which later led to a serious dispute with President Mecklenburg. The league continued to push for greater middle-class women’s colonization, but lacked funding to pursue their foremost aim. The Colonial Society’s executive committee noted their own decade-long dedication to solve the women question in the German colonies through sponsored women’s colonization and their full funding of the current program.30 The Colonial Society agreed to continue to bear the entire financial burden for women’s passages to South West Africa until the Women’s League acquired sufficient capital to recruit their own candidates. The society relied on the league to fulfill South West African settlers’ requests for servants or other workers, a task that the men of the Colonial Society designated as women’s work. Thanks to Mecklenburg’s absolute power over funding, Colonial Society fully dictated the contract provisions, the application process, and selection criteria under which the league recruited German women for positions in the colony.31 In addition, the Colonial Society regularly criticized the league for many of its poor selections of candidates for settlement overseas. From the beginning,

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Women’s League chair Adda von Liliencron declared the need to recruit “truly good and capable girls” because such exemplary women could be relied on to help establish “German traditions and the ways of home” in South West Africa.32 To preserve the virtue of the transported women, the league recruited agents in the colony among the most respected colonial administrators and citizenry in each district, who were to offer care and advice to any of their recruits in distress. The Women’s League credentialed its maids, reinforcing their status as chosen women and exhorting them to respectability by awarding the departing servants with brooches designed in the German national colors and inscribed with the name of their organization. As Liliencron explained, she hoped that wearing these insignia would instill good conduct in the recruits. More practically, the brooches identified their association with the Women’s League. The league’s central office had received reports of impostors who falsely claimed connection with its program and expressed great concern over these fraudulent women. Many settlers assumed that the league sponsored nearly all German women in the territory, and gossiped incessantly about them.33 When gossip revealed that individual transportees misbehaved, Women’s League spokespersons blamed immoral German settler men for leading them astray. The organization offered its guarantee that it did all that was humanly possible to uncover the characters of applicants. Whenever the league’s sponsored servants made good, the society boasted of their successes. If a woman fell from grace, however, the league washed its hands of accountability: Nonetheless, we cannot put our hands in the fire for one of the young girls. You should know, if you have been over there [in South West Africa] long enough, that the influence first of the long, unaccompanied steamer voyage, with the many dangers of the third class that we unfortunately cannot eliminate, and then the effects from the completely changed circumstances, and, last but not least also the climate as well, are incalculable even on upright and good girls. In any case, those who have a young girl travel over here must bear a much greater responsibility and concern for her than in the same situation in the homeland.34 The Atlantic passage became a locus of organizers’ greatest concern, as fellow travelers took note of any sexual misconduct onboard ship and talked about women who engaged in risqué behavior before they even set foot on shore. The league deplored the many moral dangers which arose from close contact with déclassé European men during the ship passages. Most of all, the widespread gossip undermined the league’s claims that these especially selected female migrants were morally superior to the African maids working in German settlers’ homes or more respectable potential brides than many biracial wives.35

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Growing Racial Awareness in the Colony In South West Africa evidence suggests growing white prejudice against mixedrace unions in the colony at the start of the twentieth century. Yet even after the native wars some segments of the colonial community disputed that white women were inherently more respectable than Rehoboth Baster and other biracial women. Even after the 1905 mixed-race marriage ban in South West Africa officially barred whites’ intermarriage with Rehoboth Basters, and despite the subsequent resumption of the German Colonial Society’s women’s settlement program, a number of male colonists continued to argue that their spouses and fiancées of color were respectable and proper housewives, and that their unions deserved civil registration and full legal recognition. For example, Erich Ludwig, a German farmer in Bethanien (Keetmanshoop District) and former soldier in the Protectorate Forces, protested in outrage in 1908 when he was denied the right to a legally binding marriage with his Rehoboth Baster fiancée: “The imperial government cannot possibly demand that I trade my bride, with whom I already have been engaged several years and who is recognized in the district as a highly upright girl for a girl I don’t know at all from Germany. Enough unfortunate experiences already have been had here with them.”36 His complaints seem to be directed against the German women’s settlement program. Perhaps surprisingly, Bethanien regional officer Wasserfall was sympathetic to Ludwig’s marriage application, remarking that his biracial fiancée’s family “lived according to the customs of whites, and did not interact on the same level with the natives.” Wasserfall’s immediate superior overseeing the Keetmanshoop District, Karl Schmidt, opposed the union. Schmidt recommended that German authorities force the couple to separate. The case demonstrates that, in the intimate local communities of the colony, a few members of the settler community had some African heritage but were recognized on the same status as whites. Although Schmidt appeared to be hostile toward interracial marriage in Ludwig’s case, about a year later he officially requested that the Windhoek administration recognize another German settler’s biracial wife as legally white, along with a few other biracial residents in his own town.37 Calls for such recognitions came as stricter racial policies began to impact German men in interracial marriages. Many German settlers likely sided with an editorial position in the German South West African Newspaper, which in March of 1909 supported the official ban on intermarriage but declared, “One should declare as white such wives with small mixture of native blood who have proven their worth, in the interests of their husbands.” However, the editor of the Windhoek News admonished in 1910 that such sympathy was misplaced and dangerous: “Exactly for [white] people whose racial consciousness is so weak, it is doubly necessary that absolutely no exceptions be made at all and thus the damaging nature of this type of racial mixing be

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made clear.”38 The German community in the colony thus remained divided over the question of how far to take this self-proclaimed racial consciousness once it impacted not only individuals and families communities had previously treated as white but also on German men’s rights. German settlers began to exercise stronger social discrimination against German men with biracial wives and children in various towns in South West Africa during the Herero and Nama Wars. In 1906 German voluntary societies and institutions began to exclude German settler men openly involved in biracial unions and their families from membership. In January 1909 the newly drafted charter for self-rule in the colony, establishing a system of elected governing councils both for the various districts and for the colony as a whole, included paragraph 17f excluding otherwise eligible German settler men who cohabited or remained in marriages with women of color from the right to vote or hold elected office. The governor was empowered to make exceptions in cases of longstanding marriages where he determined the moral conduct of the man’s family demonstrated his worthiness for restoration of his civic rights. When local officials forwarded the names of men barred from these rights, a number of prominent names of longstanding white settler men figured on the list. Some colonists noted the hypocrisy of punishing men who acknowledged their liaisons, while overlooking the behavior of settler men who engaged in furtive sexual contact with women of color. Swakopmund’s Protestant pastor, Hans Hasenkamp, who was himself an officer of the local Women’s League chapter, remarked in a letter to a colonial newspaper in 1909: “A sense of justice rejects the idea that the society can degrade members to second class who stand in enduring marital unions with native women and who raise their children responsibly, while fellow citizens who have conceived mixed-race children through ungoverned sexual intercourse and don’t care for them at all are completely unscathed.”39 Protests did not lead to the restoration of these settler men’s lost political rights. The Gibeon District Association, was among the earliest private association of settlers also to exclude settler men from membership if they were in conjugal relationships with African or biracial women. As we have seen, Gibeon was at the center of the Witbooi Nama uprising, and several prominent German settler families in the district suffered deaths during the fighting. Moreover, the town was also home to many Afrikaners, whom many German colonists viewed as both unwelcome outsiders and to be laxer in their racial consciousness. The number of racial intermarriages in the town was not large: the Gibeon District Office’s official tally of mixed-race households counted only three settler men married to women who were not pure white, who together had four mixed-race sons. The men’s last names suggest they were not ethnically German. Despite increasing social opprobrium against white men in lasting biracial partnerships, however, German men’s casual sexual liaisons, rapes, and sexual coercion of Herero and Nama women during and after the native wars arguably were much more responsible for the growing number of biracial children born in South West Africa. By April 1910, at the meeting of the

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Colonial Council, Deputy Governor Hintrager estimated between three hundred and four hundred half-white children of unknown paternity had been born in the colony since the rebellions; he sought stringent measures to reduce the incidence of such births.40

White Men’s Sexual Contact with African Women For most of the first year of the African uprisings, the German military forces continued an extermination policy that led them to execute nearly all African captives. Only beginning in January 1905 and lasting until January 1908 did German forces inter surviving Nama and Herero captives in prisoner of war camps, which also housed the elderly, women, and children, in the cities of Windhoek, Karibib, Omaruru, Swakopmund, and Lüderitzbucht. These camps served as labor recruitment pools for local colonial employers. Indeed, many African prisoners remained in their assigned work positions after the official period of captivity ended. Under the native ordinances, German authorities required all able-bodied adult men and women Africans to work in paid employment (for whites), including any and all ethnic Herero, Damara, Nama, and Khoekhoen found to be living outside of German settlements in the bush. Officials also made attempts to round up Africans living in areas outside German police control, but had only limited success. African workers in the colony’s German towns resided in segregated housing quarters that locals called werfts. The cities that had hosted the prison encampments of Africans remained among the locations where biracial births grew the fastest. For example, Hintrager cited an increase in the annual birth rate from 68 to 186 biracial infants from 1909 to 1910 in Windhoek and a comparable increase from 12 to 107 in the same period in Karibib.41 Given the malnourishment, hardship, and resulting poor physical conditions of many African survivors of the wars, and the resultant low birthrates in these communities, as well as contemporary observers’ allegations that African women often aborted fetuses fathered by white men, statistical accounts of escalating biracial birth rates may be inadequate in reflecting just how widespread sexual contact was between German men and African women. Historians have uncovered a range of German and Herero sources that indicate that German soldiers and civilians raped African women both in the camps and in their places of employment. Herero complainants widely reported that female family members working as maids had been raped by white male employers. In Windhoek a missionary alleged that the military administration had built an illicit brothel behind the garrison that they staffed with involuntary Herero women internees from the camps, while missionary testimony in the town of Omaruru alleged that white male laborers invaded the local internment camps and sexually assaulted female prisoners: “In the evening, several white men from the railroad took the trolley to the Herero kraal and caught

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three Herero women, and took them with them as wives with the knowledge of the guards on watch. During the darkness of the following evening the same hunt was repeated. The desired and sought-after women now fled and hid themselves.”42 Other historiography has concluded that casual sexual relations—both consensual and coerced—between European men and African women in South West Africa were already common in the 1880s. The marked rise in biracial birthrates after the native revolts thus resulted from the increased number of German troops stationed in South West Africa, an influx of German settlers to the territory, and the proximity of white men in garrison cities to the prison camps and werfts populated with reduced numbers of African men and large numbers of captive African women. However, the climate of increased racial hostility of Germans settlers toward Africans depicted above also may have motivated some of these sexual assaults. Adding insult to injury, however, post rebellion German sources often blamed African women for seducing white men, asserting that white women’s immigration would supplant these men’s desire for black women and reduce the unwanted mixed-race children that resulted from their unions with them.43 Only 20 percent of Germans owned sufficient property and met the residency and other requirements as voters for the Colonial Council established in 1910. The colonial charter’s paragraph 17f excluded men in biracial unions, resulting in a Colonial Council that was overtly hostile to interracial relationships. At their first convening in May 1910 the Colonial Council debated the issue of how to discourage interracial unions and biracial births in South West Africa. There, Deputy Governor Hintrager, among other strong objectors to racial mixing in the colony, recommended stringent measures, including a policy of child removal of biracial infants from black mothers; the publication of offending white fathers’ names; and a paternal fine to cover the costs of the child’s upbringing in missionary orphanages for native children. German officials’ concern over the rising biracial birth rate in these prison camps gave them added incentive to encourage the immigration of white women both as potential sexual partners and as domestic labor for unmarried settler men. Judging from the rising rate of biracial children born in the colony, however, the establishment of bordellos with white prostitutes in Swakopmund and Windhoek obviously did not have the intended effect of squelching sexual contacts between white men and women of color.44 The city of Keetmanshoop offers an instructive example of the growing concern among officials and white settlers regarding race and reproduction. In April 1906 members of the Keetmanshoop parish council rejected an application to establish a bordello to house white prostitutes in their region—out of fear that tolerance toward prostitution would discourage future white women’s settlement there. The applicant for the brothel permit cited a growing number of military personnel facing disciplinary charges for visiting the local werft at night. District Officer Karl Schmidt countered that hard labor had discouraged soldiers’ nighttime trespasses and the most recent examination of twenty native women who prostituted them-

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selves (of the approximately five hundred African women of the werft) found that only two had been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease.45 However, by 1908 circumstances had changed, including an influx of many white, male railroad workers. Schmidt and the Keetmanshoop District Council (Bezirksbeirat) overturned their former objections to a bordello. Schmidt asserted that the area’s prostitutes of color now were “frequently sexually diseased and damage for life the best strength of the young [white] men who are moving to our colony.” Schmidt’s statement deploys language couched in eugenics. The district’s written decision to allow the bordello for white prostitutes attributed grave local social problems to African women’s prostitution: According to the doctors there are many natives in Keetmanshoop who are sexually diseased, and many whites as well. Many native families feed themselves solely through prostitution. The men lead comfortable lives, not by working, but through the money that their wives and daughters earn through their unclean transactions. . . . Nor does the sexual contact of whites with natives contribute to an elevation of the white race in the eyes of the latter. From day to day the natives display more insolence. After the establishment of a bordello here the visits of whites to the werft at night, which takes place despite the prohibition, also will die down.46 Scholarly research on the spread of syphilis in southern Africa attributes the spread of the disease in the region to the concentrations of men in garrisons and mining communities who frequented prostitutes. As more and more concentrated populations of white men grew among soldiers, railroad workers, and miners in South West Africa, white and black prostitution followed, along with spikes in venereal diseases. There were only limited effective cures at this time, such as potentially harmful arsenic and mercury treatments. German and other Europeans stereotyped African female prostitutes as heavily infected with venereal diseases.47 Arguably, as officials in South West African garrison and mining towns responded to reported increases in syphilis, they began to regard all African women as potentially dangerous carriers of disease, which helps explain administrators’ growing watchfulness of African women and eagerness to suppress their sexual contacts with white men. Indeed, the colonial administration agreed in 1906 that only African prostitutes would be subject to compulsory sexual exams, but reversed the promise from alarm over rising rates of white infections. For example, a doctor diagnosed 63 percent of the white mine workers in Tsumeb with syphilis in 1908. In response, the local administrator subjected all the town’s residents of color to a mandatory examination. He remarked that establishing a bordello would not be effective in the town, since there was ample opportunity for casual sexual contact in the bush between African women and white mine workers. He and others suspected that sexual relations between white employers and African

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maids was another major source of infection, further impetus for importing more white maids.48 Scholarship also has documented a pattern of local administrators’ sexual and moral surveillance of white and non-white women in South West Africa. Population records became an important tool in the administration’s efforts to deter interracial unions. In September 1906 Governor Lindequist ordered a census taken in each district recording the mixed-race households in the colony. The Keetmanshoop district administrator completed the enumeration and forwarded the results for his jurisdiction in February 1907. The report gave Keetmanshoop the unwanted distinction of the colonial administrative district with the highest rate of interracial cohabitation in the colony: it contained a list of approximately twenty men, mostly farmers, living in mixed race unions. In response, Hintrager, as a deputy in the governor’s office in Windhoek, immediately charged the district office to report on how “this danger can be reduced.” The acting district officer of Keetmanshoop had two controversial propositions: refusing state benefits such as war reparations to white men in unions with women of color, and opening a dormitory for unmarried German maids in the city. Deputy Governor Hintrager forwarded these ideas to the highest level of the civil administration, the German chancellor’s office in Berlin.49 The very suggestion to withhold war reparations from male settlers in these interracial unions reveals the continued shadow that the African uprisings cast on German race and population policies in the colony—to deny restitution implicitly suggested they sided with the Africans in the imagined race war through their conjugal unions. There is no evidence that the chancellor’s office pursued the recommendation. In general, scholars have concluded that colonial officials respected white patriarchal authority and were reluctant to impinge on the legal rights and sexual prerogatives of German men in interracial relations.50 The ostensibly private efforts of the German Colonial Society and Women’s League to assist German women to colonize were less controversial, so German bureaucrats welcomed the construction of a dormitory in Keetmanshoop to house sponsored German maids.

The Proposed Dormitory for Unmarried White Women Schmidt’s proposal to found a dormitory for newly arrived German servant women captured the attention of the Windhoek central colonial administration. The acting Keetmanshoop district officer’s lengthy report to the German chancellor on “means to inhibit marriages between whites and women of colored blood and the co-residence of such persons” outlined a detailed plan to establish an institutional home for twelve single white German servant women in Keetmanshoop. The occupants would spend their time washing, sewing, cooking, and baking for the local administrative officers, troops, police station, and prison, thereby covering the

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overhead and administrative costs of the residence. Not only would these residents be potential maids and future wives for white settlers , but they also would work in direct competition with African maids, cooks, and laundresses, reducing the number of suspected sexual liaisons from black or biracial maids employed in white bachelor’s homes.51 After Governor Lindequist was promoted to colonial undersecretary in Berlin in 1910, his replacement, Bruno von Schuckmann, arrived in South West Africa to assume the governorship. Schuckmann strongly backed the proposed dormitory. Logic might have dictated Windhoek, the largest white population center, as the best site for a white maid’s dormitory, but Windhoek was not the center of interracial cohabitation in the colony. So, Schuckmann began to importune the Women’s League to build a dormitory for newly arrived white servants in Keetmanshoop. He insisted a dormitory for simple maids was far preferable to the league officials’ vain hope of settling teachers, governesses, and the like within the colony. He noted that the few German families in Keetmanshoop had been slow to seek female servants through the Colonial Society, thereby limiting the migration of single white women to the area to date.52 Schuckmann’s persuasions failed to mention the origins of the scheme as part of the colonial government’s campaign to discourage interracial unions and mixedrace births, but the Keetmanshoop district advisory council (Bezirksbeirat) described a rationale for the maids’ dormitory more forthrightly: The district council spoke out in its meeting of 27 December [1907] that it is premature to send genteel young ladies as teachers, governesses or household assistants. . . . In general, we don’t need ladies here yet. What the South really needs are capable, simple and hard-working girls, if possible, from rural areas, who are suited to be farmers’ and handworkers’ wives. Not one more farmer or skilled worker would sink down and marry a Bastard girl, if he could get a white German girl here. . . . In light of the effort nowadays spreading through the population to keep the white race pure, I am convinced that certain signs show that many would very much like to be free of their Bastard wives, since it is in most cases nothing more than a Bastard business deal, which the pure white families look down on with contempt.53 The dormitory proposal takes on a disturbing cast when its origins are revealed as yet another tactic of German colonial officials as part of their escalating campaign to impose white racial purity in South West Africa. The establishment of the white women’s dormitory accompanied colonial officials’ efforts to restrict and punish German men’s sexual contact with African women and bar intermarriages with women of color. Though Keetmanshoop district officer Schmidt had strongly advocated recognition of select biracial families as legally and socially white in his community, his remarks demonstrate the growing pressure that German admin-

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istrators imposed on the German men to abandon their unions with black and biracial women. As a sign of Schmidt’s eagerness, he lobbied heavily for the dormitory to be established in his jurisdiction. He claimed, “the fact that barmaids and serving wenches often get married here, proves how great the demand for white girls to marry really is, and, if the girls’ home to be founded by the Women’s League is built around here, for now there would be no complaints about a shortage of departures.” Even more jarring, Schmidt’s calls for the dormitory coincided within two months with Keetmanshoop district plans to build a bordello for white prostitutes, and both decisions followed administrative pressure from his superiors in Windhoek and Berlin to suppress the numbers of interracial unions and births in the district.54 Of course, German colonial administration’s efforts to introduce the settlement of additional white maids, wives, and brides—as well as white prostitutes—did nothing to diminish either the neediness of hungry African survivors who traded sex for food or the vulnerability of African women prisoners and laborers to German men’s sexual assaults. Settler newspaper reports offer only rare documentation of criminal charges of rape against German men. However, one scandalous 1912 news story detailed the indictment of German police sergeant Odenwald in the city of Keetmanshoop. The intoxicated Odenwald invaded the local werft, abducted Tissi, a ten-year old Nama girl with a weak heart, from her sickbed and raped her. She subsequently died. A second police sergeant was convicted of conspiracy in the attack. Odenwald received a sentence of four and a half years for the rape, but the court did not find sufficient proof for a charge of manslaughter. A local newspaper, the Lüderitzbucht Newspaper, commented in light of the incident that African maids in the colony still commonly experienced unwanted sexual approaches from German men: “The [settler] population has already complained for a long time that their [African] female domestic servants have been seized and pestered by soldiers in the evenings on their way home. Some employers have even felt compelled on several occasions to accompany their female servants, who did not want to go home without protection, to the werft.”55 The news article went on to assert that the understaffed German police patrols were needed elsewhere for more-pressing matters. Although German officials sought to introduce German servants as potential brides, interracial unions, including the rape and coercion of African women continued. By 1912 the South West African census reported another increase in the census count to 1,390 mixed-race children in the colony, and Keetmanshoop still had the largest number (215).56

The League’s Struggle to Build its Dormitory German administrators in the colony proposed that the Women’s League build a servant dormitory and encouraged its placement in the unlikely garrison town of

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Keetmanshoop, an area with limited employment opportunities for white women. The executive council of the Women’s League accepted the dormitory proposal under the recommendation of the colonial governor and colonial undersecretary to expand working-class women’s settlement in South West Africa. Perhaps the league’s lack of enthusiasm for sponsored working-class maids’ settlement explains why the organization struggled to fund the proposed Mädchen-Heim (Maids’ House). After a year of steady collections, by the spring of 1909 the league still was nowhere near the minimal needed funds to begin construction. The failure was a stark contrast to the success of the maternity hospital campaign whose doors quickly opened. In fall 1909 the scheme assumed the more attractive title of Heimat-House (Homeland House), a name that suggested the transplanting of culture from the German homeland to South West Africa.57 Chair Irmgard von Richthofen, who briefly took over as executive of the Women’s League after its first leader Adda von Liliencron stepped down for family reasons in April 1909, resorted to pleading with the Colonial Society to donate the necessary start-up capital. Richthofen also requested significant financial contributions from the German government, including a Reichstag subsidy, reduced or free access to government-controlled land in South West Africa, and even German administrators’ help in soliciting funds from private businesses in the territory. In contrast to thinly veiled state subvention of the maternity hospital in Windhoek, officials and Colonial Society leaders indicated an unwillingness to become too closely entangled in its public backing or fundraising. The colonial governor balked at the idea of donating land or including a large request for the project in its annual Reichstag budget.58 Colonialist men’s distance from the scheme maintained the convenience that the Women’s League, as a private women’s organization, could represent the proposed maid’s dormitory as an uncontroversial charitable scheme, which underplayed its racial and eugenic motives. Still, the league’s fundraising appeals made little headway. In March 1910, after two years of sustained fundraising, the league did not have enough money even to purchase the desired building site in Keetmanshoop for 48,000 marks, and Richthofen, who had been ill, died the same month.59 Richthofen’s replacement was the capable administrator Hedwig Heyl, a noted Berlin philanthropist and home economist who now took over as chair of an organization with sixty chapters and six thousand members yet insufficient capital to complete its foremost task.60 Heyl’s tenure as president marked the league’s efforts to move toward greater ideological independence from the Colonial Society as well as a firmer determination among the national officers to promote genteel women’s colonization. First, however, the league again was forced to beg the Colonial Society for money in order to secure the needed funds to complete the Homeland House dormitory. Heyl’s renewed appeal for funding from the Colonial Society represented the existing means of promoting German women’s settlement in South West Africa through families as slow and ineffectual. She argued the pro-

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posed dormitory would increase the number of unmarried German women in the colony quickly to balance the sexual composition of the German population in South West Africa. Perhaps in recognition of these arguments, the Colonial Society reluctantly loaned the Women’s League 50,000 marks interest-free. The sudden infusion of cash enabled the project’s rapid completion. The first recruits for the Homeland House embarked in October 1910.61 German and South West African newspapers circulated Heyl’s speech upon the opening of the House, which heralded the dormitory as a patriotic, white pronatalist scheme rather than as a center of German culture in the colony, though the home eventually boasted musical instruments and a reading library. Her inaugural message called on German women to preserve Germany’s eugenic future by saving German settler men in South West Africa from the dangers of racial mixing: “The German women in the motherland naturally must help to ensure the future of the fatherland, and every one must contribute her share through propaganda and donations in this difficult transition period. German men can only remain truly German [urdeutsch] if they are not dragged down by the dark race, but instead can found a German family. . . . To combat [the danger of racial mixing], the territory must be provided with simple, undemanding, brave, and virtuous women, and only with such, not with marriage-hungry so-called salon ladies.”62 Heyl’s speech borrowed heavily from colonialist men’s language. While she envisioned a role for German clubwomen as the saviors of German settler men and the white race, she again elevated simple women as the preferred German mothers, against the cultured ladies who predominated in the league.

The Homeland House Dormitory in Action As Heyl promised, the dormitory soon became an important site for the introduction of single German women to South West Africa. A league report on the 116 immigrant women who inhabited the Homeland House from its opening in October 1910 through October 1913 officially stated that thirty-one (about a quarter) had married and five more were engaged, although ten had left the colony already. League members in the colony had not been able to trace a number of the women so these figures are an incomplete accounting.63 The dormitory housed up to ten women at a time, and the Women’s League eventually set a goal of transporting two or three new residents per month. Of course, this would demand rapid placement of its occupants through employment or marriage, and would allow only a limited adjustment and educational period for new arrivals. In practice, larger groups of newcomers arrived more sporadically and their length of stay also varied. The dormitory served as a significant component of the Colonial Society women’s employment program in the colony, but was limited by its size. The dormitory housed nearly one-third of all the Colonial Society–sponsored servants in the colony after

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1910. Applications for direct placement of maids was still more popular and continued to increase annually.64 Recruits for the Homeland House agreed to spend three months in residence in the home learning the nuances of German colonial housework at a minimal wage of 30 marks per month, although rapid job placement shortened the stay of many. New arrivals ideally were to have prior expertise in housecleaning, laundering, ironing, sewing, mending, cooking, baking, and raising poultry. The in-house laundry was particularly profitable, taking in some 957 marks per month on average, yet the dormitory still required support of more than 10,000 marks per year from the league.65 The Homeland House laundry stood in direct competition with African laundry services, which entrepreneurial native women had established as the shortage of maids and the large number of bachelor households increased demands. Free laborers from South Africa, white women and men, as well as local African women ran competing laundry services for white settlers. African women certainly could earn far more as independent laundresses than they could earn tied to one household as a maid. However, some German settlers took issue with the supposedly lower standards of cleanliness enforced in African laundries, which charged far less than white-run establishments. Some settlers also decried the fact that competition was permitted to exist between European- and African-owned laundries at all.66 Competition between the races and accusations of price-gauging for laundry and other domestic services caused racial tension and animosity. White maids wanted to reserve the highest-paying skilled housework such as laundry and cooking for themselves, but to do so they must establish their superiority to workers of color. This was not always possible. Only a few of the Colonial Society’s sponsored female colonists reportedly became professional washerwomen or owned laundries. A couple of the sponsored maids reported ironing full-time, but this was a skilled and physically challenging position that paid among the highest wages in the colony—as much or more than professional cooks earned. Despite the profession’s earning potential, the demanding occupation apparently held little appeal for single German women, who seem to have been far more likely to work in families or in established businesses rather than independently. The laundry installation in the league’s dormitory, the Homeland House filled an important niche and could even pay the high shipping charges for importing dirty garments and water from Lüderitzbucht.67 The dormitory’s laundry service not only competed directly with African washerwomen, but also signaled its organizers’ broader intention to force wage competition between black and white domestic laborers in the colony. In October 1910, at the instigation of its chair Hedwig Heyl, the Women’s League sought to set a contractual minimum monthly wage of 50 marks for its sponsored workers. Heyl claimed that women in Germany were unwilling to sign on for less. German administrators responded by reminding the leader of the orga-

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nization’s agreement to yield to officials’ expertise in managing workers’ contracts in the colony, which Liliencron had been forced to make after her failed efforts to bring more genteel women to the colony backfired. Now, local German authorities resisted the league’s efforts to raise white domestics’ salaries, contending that a minimum salary level for white servants was not in the best interests of white settlers. Administrators urged the league not to disrupt local labor relations through unwarranted salary increases.68 In response, Heyl presented the German colonial administration with a short newspaper article from a German cook in Keetmanshoop that had circulated recently in the German daily press. The piece railed against the city’s Homeland House recruits who worked on average for 30–40 marks per month, only 10–20 marks more than the typical African servants and even less than experienced immigrant South African maids of color. “What difference is there between [this and] Kaffir [derogatory term] wages? Nothing! Absolutely nothing!”69 These highly embarrassing allegations against the league served as evidence that the league’s dormitory was encouraging German maids’ wage competition with black domestics, a contention that stiffened Heyl’s resolve to impose the minimum salary. The unfavorable newspaper account moved German administrators in the colony to investigate the Keetmanshoop domestic service labor market more closely. The ensuing official report largely confirmed the close salary ranges between white maids and servants of color reported in the German newspapers. The average general white maid in the district apparently earned 50 marks monthly, while migrant biracial maids from British South Africa (“Cape girls”) earned 30–50 marks, and up to 80 marks if they also cooked and laundered for their employers’ household. The local district officer welcomed the lowered wages for white servants in competition with African domestics.70 German administrators were reluctant or unable to provide enough African servants for white settlers but deplored the immigration of biracial servants from British Cape Colony. Lüderitzbucht district officer Rudolph Böhmer viewed these migrants as the “most undesirable” segment of the population.71 He and other district officers favored white maids because they regarded “Cape Girls” and African maids in settler homes, especially washerwomen, as sexual temptations for settler men and so potential sources of race-mixing.72 Many German employers were not as eager to hire German maids, because they typically refused to do menial housework, which they relegated to African servants. Some settlers bemoaned white servants’ general unwillingness to do demeaning or physically demanding household chores, their rising wage demands, and their limited knowledge of local housework practices, which limited their usefulness. In 1913 a prominent Windhoek member of the Colonial Society, Dr. Findeisen, complained of sponsored German maids’ high pay given their lack of expertise in local housekeeping and their dependence on African underlings: It cannot be said that the [white] maids here first learn all that is necessary. Beyond the fact that the climate is unsuitable for strenuous

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work, and the further matter that many chores are only performed by natives—whose knowledge is unconditionally necessary—hinders the maids from gaining a comprehensive understanding of the relevant tasks. A maid with sufficient capabilities in housework and a somewhat practical sense can always find a position and receive good pay—although, at the same time it should be warned that the salaries are not so high as they were a few years ago.”73 German maids jealously guarded their preferential work conditions and other privileges over servants of color, and their presence may well have increased racial friction within settler homes. Of course, many of the German women who migrated as general servants sought advancement through more-skilled positions as cooks or housekeepers. Not surprisingly, some of the highest women’s wages in southern Africa went to white waitresses and counter girls, and even to women hired to mix with white male clientele in drinking establishments. As German colonial officials sought to attract white maids (and white prostitutes) to their districts, they aimed to deter white settler men from both sexual and domestic ties to biracial and African women. Officials also sought to suppress white servant women’s wages. Because many of the newly arrived German women aimed at rapid economic mobility, they often left servant positions. Some formed casual relationships with higher-paid white men, while others gravitated to service occupations that paid better than servant work, but that sometimes placed their reputations at risk.74

Conclusion The Herero and Nama Wars had helped to produce a tense racial climate in South West Africa, spurring efforts of German colonialists to embrace extremist racial and eugenics theories of reproduction against a perceived race war. The Colonial Society and its Women’s League cooperated in mobilizing white women colonists to the fight, though not on equal terms. The society continued to promote German women brides, wives, and other settlers’ dependents to South West Africa, while the league focused on recruiting unmarried women for servant positions in the colony. Together, they also helped to build and support a charitable maternity hospital serving white mothers and infants, as well as a dormitory for immigrant white maids in South West Africa, though the society always bore the brunt of the costs. German bureaucrats in South West Africa imposed new barriers on German settler men to deter interracial marriages and mixed-race births, but focused on channeling German women’s settlement, as well as the establishment of bordellos for white prostitutes as solutions to racial mixing, despite their limited impact on the number of biracial birthrates. Officials also punitively imposed sexual exams on African women to discourage casual liaisons and sexual infections of white men. These efforts by colonial administrators and colonial organizations further

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entrenched German women in South West Africa in very limited reproductive and domestic roles, though working-class women often broke these expectations in pursuit of economic mobility. The league found that damaging gossip surrounded their sponsored workingclass women in South West Africa, though German settler men did not face similar scrutiny. From the beginning, the league put forward the idea to recruit more middle-class women as housekeepers from Germany, as morally and culturally superior to working-class and peasant women. Repeatedly, colonial administrators in South West Africa forced league officials to concede that refined ladies were unwelcome. The colonial administration in South West Africa urged further efforts on the part of the league to bring simple German women as maids and wives to serve as bulwarks against German men’s race-mixing in the territory, including the building of a dormitory in the garrison city of Keetmanshoop, an area of high interracial births. Though colonial officials were eager to stem the rising interracial population, they did little to restrain white men’s sexual assaults and coercion of African women. Instead, colonial officials broke up the households of biracial couples, and limited the numbers of African servant women and laundresses who worked for white settler men through fostering wage competition with white maids. Lower wages also likely pushed white servant women into other kind of service work, but also resulted in less reputable strategies such as cohabitation with white men or work as bar hostesses. Officials did not successfully deter interracial unions, and the competition that lowered German maids’ salaries escalated racial and class tensions, particularly disputes over the racial division of domestic work in settler homes. As the next chapter details, colonial administrators also confronted increased violence between white employers and their African servants.

Notes 1. Wildenthal, German Women, 139–42 on Ada von Liliencron and the wars. Liliencron donated proceeds from her books to German settlers in need. “Literatur,” DKZ 22, no. 32 (12 Aug. 1905). The Colonial Society’s newspaper recorded many women’s teas and other fund drives to help struggling settlers. Quataert, Staging Philanthropy, on conservative gender roles in women’s rituals of fundraising and national commemorations 5–9, and on wartime nursing, 236–43. Boge-Smidt, “Germania,” 242, notes that thirty-one nurses served, and details recognitions for German settler women. On the nationalist revival and the elections of 1907, see Eley, Reshaping, 254–60. 2. Quoted from “Ein offenes Wort,” DSWAZ, (13 June 1906), 1, rejecting Alexander Kuhn’s call to German women’s organizations to help civilize Africans in the wake of the uprisings, referring to a positive review article of Kuhn’s book in a German bourgeois feminist weekly, “Ein Ruf an Deutschlands Frauen,” Frauen Reich 33, no. 14 (1 Apr. 1906): 209–12. The moderate feminist paper was the official organ of the Berliner Hausfrauenverein (Berlin Housewife’s Union) and the Zentralverband für Hauswirtschaftliche Frauenbildung (Central Organization of Women’s Home Economics Education). 3. Hydroengineer Alexander Kuhn, Zum Eingeborenenproblem in Deutsch-Südwestafrika. Ein Ruf an Deutschlands Frauen (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1905), 40. Kuhn also was author of

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

hydrological reports on the region. His biographical sketch appears online. See S2A3 Biographical Database of southern African Science, http://www.s2a3.org.za/bio/Biograph_fi nal.php?serial=1586 (accessed Nov. 15, 2020). Reagin, Sweeping the German Nation, 63–69, examines the efforts of middle-class German housewives to domesticate African colonial populations and spaces. “Die Frau und die Kolonien (Ohne Verantwortung der Gesellschaft),” DKZ 22, no. 13 (30 May 1905). See also the similar article in a journal sponsored by the Colonial Society in the same year: Richter, “Die Frau und die Kolonien.” Richter in particular is critical of German feminists, as was a keynote speech by the local chapter leader at the society’s annual meeting in Essen, Chapter head Stockmann, “Gartenfest Essen,” DKZ 22, no. 26 (1 July 1905): 259. Quote, 259 criticizes the majority of feminists as false due to their colonial “Schwäche” and “Unentschlossenheit,” but welcomes the support of women in theory if their views of feminism supported the established colonial movement. Wildenthal, “Colonizers and Citizens,” 155–67 and 185–94, contends several female colonialist authors were crucial to the revival of the colonial woman question during the colonial wars, and provides an excellent discussion of Liliencron’s role in the women’s colonial movement. Liliencron (1844–1913), born Freiin (Baroness) von Wrangel in Lützow bei Charlottenburg, grew up in a military family and later married an army officer, Freiherr Karl von Liliencron, who took part in the German Wars of Unification. Her family background imbued her with her deep ties to German militarism and nationalism. She reportedly expanded her interests from militaristic patriotism only to become an advocate for the German colonies after witnessing the embarkation of German troops headed to South West Africa in June 1904. KH 2, no. 17 (9 May 1909): 8. The maternalist bent of her imperialist beliefs is readily apparent in her writings, such as Adda von Liliencron, Reiterbriefe aus Südwest. Briefe und Gedichte aus dem Feldzuge in Südwestafrika in den Jahren 1904–1906 (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1907). One of her public monikers became mother of Africa (Afrikamutter), according to Paul Rohrbach, “Ein Urteil über den kolonialen Frauenbund,” KH 7, no. 44 (1913–14): 8. Cauer interpreted the election returns as the Liberal coalition’s great opportunity. Else Lüders, ed. Minna Cauer. Leben und Werk (Gotha: Leopold Klotz Verlag, 1925), 140. Cauer, Berlin, to Dernburg, Berlin, 18 Jan. 1907, RKA 6693, 3. “Weckrufe” Die Frauenbewegung 12, no. 24 (15 Dec. 1906): 185–86; “Vortrag des Herrn Wirklichen Geheimrat Dernburg über die Kolonien des Deutschen Reiches, in Stuttgart,” Die Frauenbewegung 13, no. 3 (1 Feb. 1907): 18; Venghiattis, “Mobilizing, 69–73. The Deutschkolonialer Frauenbund or German Colonial Women’s League was the original name of the organization,“Aufforderung zum Beitritt in den Deutschkolonialen Frauenbund,” KH 1, no.1 (1 Oct. 1907): 13. Wildenthal, German Women, 138–51; Venghiattis, “Mobilizing,” 61–65. Briefly mentioned in this book’s introduction, surgeon Philalethes Kuhn was a major figure in the German racial hygiene movement and key Nazi racial scientist, Michael Kater, Doctors under Hitler (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 113. Kuhn, Gesundheitlicher Ratgeber für Südwestafrika (Berlin: Mittler, 1907), 228–30, discusses the dangers of racial mixing and degeneration, further remarking on the danger of Africanization among German men in South West Africa for long periods without exposure to high German culture; quote, 228. Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 14. Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 53–56, sees distinct patterns of pronatalism and control of women’s fertility in Italy, where Mussolini paid little attention to race before Italy’s 1936 colonization in Ethiopia. “Gründung eines Deutsch-kolonialen Frauenbundes,” DSWAZ 9, no. 37 (8 May 1907). “Die Frauenfrage in Südwest,” DSWAZ 16, no. 128 (12 Nov. 1913). Kaulich, Die Geschichte, 490–92; Bley, South-West Africa, 186–87.

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13. The changing population is reflected in census reports from 1907 and 1913 tables, which also reflect the independent status of the former subdistricts of Keetmanshoop and Gibeon. The tenth anniversary journal of the league lists overseas chapters in South West Africa and their year of founding Gobabis (1914), Karibib (1910), Keetmanshoop (1910), Lüderitzbucht (1912), Tsumeb (1914), Usakos (1911), Warmbad (1914) and Windhoek (1913) according to Ausschuß des Frauenbundes der Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, ed., 10 Jahre Frauenbund der Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (Berlin: Kolonie und Heimatverlagsgesellschaft, 1918), 83–85. 14. Else Frobenius, “Die Führerinnen des Frauenbundes der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft,” Kriegsnummer von KH 11, no. 37 (1917–18), quotes Mecklenburg’s reference to the union as a young marriage. Chickering, “Casting Their Gaze,” argues this terminology was more than symbolic. The Colonial Society head expected the Women’s League to conduct its operations like a dutiful and deferential wife. Venghiattis, “Mobilizing,” 90–97; Walgenbach, “Die Weiße Frau,” 85–88. 15. German Colonial Department, Berlin, to the Governor’s office, Windhoek, 26 Mar. 1907, DSWA, L.II.k.1, Bd. 1, 100. “Deutsch-kolonialer Frauenbund,” DSWAZ 9, no. 49 (19 June 1907) on Colonial Society members on the league’s board, Mecklenburg, Wiligrad to Freifrau von Liliencron, Blankenburg in Thuringia, 17 May 1907, DKG 153, 15–16. The Teaching Farm in Brakwater discussed in later chapters was the main rival group. 16. DKG 153, 176, quote from Women’s League proposal at the General Assembly, “Vorlage für Punkt 13 der Tagesordnung, Hauptversammlung der DKG in Bremen am 12 Juni 1908,” Venghiattis, “Mobilizing,” 79. 17. Chickering, “Casting Their Gaze”; Wildenthal, “Colonizers and Citizens”; and, more recently, German Women, 156–61 argue convincingly that elements within the league also adopted a feminist orientation, especially under Hedwig Heyl’s leadership. Wildenthal notes the Colonial Society’s resentment of Colony and Home’s popularity. 18. DSWA, L.II.k.1, Bd.1, 108, Governor Schuckmann’s office to the Women’s League, Berlin, 6 Feb. 1908; 120, Liliencron to Schuckmann, 14 Mar. 1908, 19. DSWA, L.II.k.1, Bd. 1, 140-43, Hintrager, Windhoek, to the Women’s League Vorstand (board), 3 July 1908, quote from 143. 20. George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology (1964), Reprint. (New York: Schocken, 1981): 4–5 defines the term völkisch as pertaining to the “shared, transcendental essence” of the German people, and he explains how völkisch ideology posited the superiority of peasant stock against national degeneration (27). DSWA 1079.L.II.k.1, Bd. 1, 159–60, letter from Women’s League, Berlin (signed Buchmann) to Hintrager, Windhoek, 14 Sept. 1908. 21. DKG 190, 25, quoted from proposal to the German Colonial Society assembly (Ausschußsitzung), Berlin, 30 Mar. 1906. Signed by Dr. Rhode, C.J. Lange, and Philalethes Kuhn. Dr. [Max] Bail, an obstetrician, was the originator of the plan, and 68, Mecklenburg, undated broadsheet to the chapters and members. 22. Quoted from Mecklenburg, DKG 190, 68. Further German Colonial Society minutes, 54–55. 23. DKG 190, 25, Elisabeth House proposal, and DKG 190, 68, Mecklenburg’s broadsheet. The German Colonial Society’s fundraising reached the sizeable figure of 217,788 marks by Aug. 1908, “Elisabethhaus in Windhuk,” DKZ 25, no. 32 (15 Aug. 1908): 580. 24. DKG 188, 231RS. Quoted, Mecklenburg, DKG 190, 80. 25. The birth strike rumors appear in Krüger, Kriegsbewältigung, 145–55; Bley, South-West Africa, 259–60; Tessa Cleaver and Marion Wallace, Namibia. Women in War (London: Zed Books, 1990), 77–78. Territorial Council member Brandt remarked that he had heard from several sources that the Herero did not want to have children due to the loss of their cattle herds. “Aus den Sitzungen des Landesrats,” DSWAZ 12, no. 38 (11 May 1910). 26. Hintrager, Südwestafrika, 80. The Women’s Red Cross Association for the Colonies staffed the facility, and opened other maternity clinics after it. The German home’s Wikipedia page notes it closed in 1981 after caring for more than twelve thousand births.

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27. DKG 190, 55, Elisabeth-House Proposal, which emphasized maintaining very low rates for the home’s services; quote, 55; “Grundsteinlegung des Elisabeth Hauses in Windhuk,” DSWAZ 25, no. 1 (4 Jan. 1908, and “Bericht über das erste Geschäftsjahr des ElisabethHauses vom 25. April 1908 bis 30 April 1909,” DKZ 25, no. 32 (7 August 1909), 529-30. 28. “Unverheiratete Angestellte (Eingesandt),” LZ 2, 10 (5 Mar. 1910). 29. White census figures found in Boge-Smidt, “Germania,” appendix, tables 1a, 2b, 1d. The year 1909 is a reference point for the postwar era because the 1906–7 censuses did not include soldiers’ dependents. The number of protectorate soldiers in the colony in 1909 was 2,381. In 1907 these census records also indicate there were 67 marriages between whites and 152 white births, compared to 218 white marriages and 494 white births in 1913. 30. DKG 153, 34, Colonial Society Minutes, 2. Sitzung-Bericht über die Sitzung der DKG am Freitag den 7 Feb. 1908.” 31. DSWA, L.II.i.1, Bd. 1, 51-53, “Abmachungen zwischen dem Präsidenten der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft (D.K.G.) und der Vorsitzenden des Deutschkolonialen Frauenbundes (K. Fr. Bd.),” KH 1, 22 (19 July 1908): 8, copy from Mecklenburg to the government of South West Africa, 30 May 1908 of the agreement between the heads of the Colonial Society and Women’s League, 25 Mar. 1908. 32. Quoted from Adda von Liliencron, “Deutsch-Kolonialer Frauenbund,” DSWAZ Beilage 10, no. 25 (28 Mar. 1908), 1, an open letter from Liliencron to Dr. Paul Rohrbach, colonial enthusiast, bureaucrat, and perhaps the most prominent theorist of his day on the economic development of South West Africa. 33. “Bundesabzeichen,” KH 2, no. 2 (11 Oct. 1908): 8 regarding imposters. DKG 153, 184-85, personal correspondence from Liliencron to Mecklenburg, Berlin, 7 July 1908. As an anonymous author remarked in “Die ‘Damen’ des Heimathauses. Eine letzte Erwiderung,” LZ 6, no. 34 (21 Aug. 1914), “Besides, very many young girls who come here are not sent by the Women’s League at all. . . . But naturally all the idiocies that are ever committed are laid at the feet of the Women’s League girls.” 34. DSWA, L.II.k.1, Bd. 1, 176, quoted from Freiherr von Dörnberg of the Women’s League, Berlin, to anonymous correspondent, Okahandja, 30 Oct. 1908 (Abschrift). 35. Noyes, “Geschlechter, Mobilität” discusses the shipboard zone as a point of cultural transfer. DSWA, L.II.k.1, Bd. 1, 118 details the circumstances surrounding the firing of one maid for associating with another against her employer’s orders. In Germany, social reformers and feminists such as Lili Braun critiqued the corrupting tendencies of paid service on the morals of young girls. Their low wages purportedly drove many to prostitution, while the demeaning occupation prepared them psychically for selling their bodies (Zull, Dienstmädchen, 117–25, 179–86). Wierling, Mädchen für Alles, 226–27, claims that German maids represented a third of all unmarried mothers in Frankfurt and Berlin in the 1890s and the beginning of the century. 36. DSWA F.IV.r.2, Bd. 1, 88-89, Quoted from Erich Ludwig to the colonial administration, Windhoek, 7 Aug. 1908. (88). See also 101-2, dated 20 Nov. 1908, Hauptmann Fremsky of Outjo to the colonial governor reporting that a local Farmer Kreuz’s wife of partial African descent was “a German farmer’s wife in the very best sense of the word” (102). Presumably not even all of the German Colonial Society’s immigrants could lay claim to this distinction. 37. DSWA, F.IV.r.2 Bd. 1, 84 and 127, Wasserfall, Distriktamt Bethanien, 14 Apr. 1908, to Schmidt, Bezirksamt Keetmanshoop, (quote 84). Schmidt, 29 Apr. 1908 to Windhoek and 25 Aug. 1909, Schmidt requesting recognition of the marriage of a prominent citizen of Keetmanshoop, the innkeeper Müller von Berneck and standing of his wife and children as whites. 38. “Wahlberechtigung und Mischehen,” WN 7, no. 19 (5 Mar. 1910) quoted as demanding strict racial barriers in the colony; DSWAZ 11, no. 25 (27 Mar. 1909) quoted from Pastor Hans Hasenkamp, “Entgegnung,” DSWAZ 11, no. 55 (10 July 1909) demanding exceptions be made in some cases.

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39. Quote from [Pastor Hans] Hasenkamp, “Das Gemeindewahlrecht und die Ehen Weißer mit Eingeborenen,” DSWAZ 11, no. 44 (2 June, 1909), 1. On societies that expelled male members in relationships with black and biracial women as well as kindergartens and schools that segregated to whites-only: “Aus Windhoek,” DSWAZ 8, no. 6 (7 Feb. 1906); Carl Becker observed in, “Das Gemeindewahlrecht und die Ehe Weißer mit Eingeborenen,” DSWAZ 11, no. 55 (10 Jul. 1909): 1: “Soon the veterans’, district, rifle, and gymnastic societies hurried to take up this paragraph [§17f] in their charters as the highest moral advancement [höchste sittliche Errungenschaft]. The adoption invariably took place, according to newspaper reports, unanimously, although many members scarcely were entitled to take part in such a vote due to their own pasts. Thereby, the following occurrence took place: a man married to a Rehoboth Baster wife (A) meets a friend (B): A: ‘So, you also voted for this fine paragraph!’ B: ‘Yes, but you should not take offense with me. I know your wife to be a very upstanding woman. But they all stood up, so I did too.’ The incident is typical.” DSWA F.IV.r.1, 105, explains the paragraph empowered the governor to recognize the patriarchs with civil marriages dating before 1905 or church marriages before 1893. 40. “Aus Windhoek,” DSWAZ 8, no. 6 (7 Feb. 1906) outlines the organizational restrictions; DSWA 785.F.IV.r.2 Bd.1, 65, Gibeon, 10 Jun.,1906 regarding farmers Krabbenhöft, Duncan, and Rieth. Hintrager in the minutes of the Colonial Advisory Council from 22 Apr. 1910, published in Oscar Hintrager, “Maßnahmen gegen die Zunahme der Mischlinge,” WN 7, no. 34 (27 Apr. 1910). 41. Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft, 143, 183; Hintrager, “Maßnahmen.” 42. Quoted from a Rhenish Missionary letter from Omaruru dated 19 May 1906, cited in Krüger, “Bestien und Opfer,” 154–55; Windhoek missionary Wandres cited in Oelsmann, Mission Church, and State, 213. 43. O’Donnell, “Colonial Woman Question,” 155–57. 44. RKA 5423, 149, Abschrift, Verordnung des Kaiserlichen Gouverneurs von Deutsch-Südwest Afrika betreffend die Mischlingsbevölkerung, 146–48, Governor Seitz, Windhoek, to the Colonial Ministry, Berlin, 24 Feb. 1911; Hartmann, “Sexual Encounters,” passim, esp. 133, 287–90. 45. DSWA, G.IV.d.2, 59g-h Bezirksamtsmann Karl Schmidt (marked Geheim! [Secret!]) to the governor, 9 Apr. 1906. 46. Quoted from Bezirksamtsmann Karl Schmidt to the governor’s office, 26 Nov. 1908 (vertraulich [confidential]) and DSWA G.IV.d.2, 77c and 77d, minutes of the Bezirksbeirat (District council), Keetmanshoop, 21 Nov. 1908. 47. Daniel Walther, Sex and Control: Venereal Disease, Colonial Physicians and Indigenous Agency in German Colonialism, 1884–1914 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 36–37, 107–11; Karen Jochelson, The Colour of Disease: Syphilis and Racism in South Africa, 1880– 1950 (London: Macmillan Palgrave, 2001), esp. 13ff. She suggests that German physicians may have misdiagnosed some Africans’ skin rashes from nonvenereal causes as venereal. 48. Nils Oermann, Mission, Church and State Relations in South West Africa under German rule, 1884–1915 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999), 188, 209–13; DSWA, H.II.h.2. Bd. 1, 12, Bezirksamtmann Grootfontein to the governor’s office in Windhoek, 18 Dec. 1908. 49. Walther, Sex and Control, 46, 118–19. DSWA F.lV.r.2, Bd. 1, 70-1, Governor’s order to district officials and follow-up, Hintrager, Windhoek, to Schmidt, Keetmanshoop, March 1907; DSWA, L.II.h.3, Bd. 1, 1-4, proposal from Vertretende Kaiserliche Bezirksamtmann Blumhagen, Keetmanshoop, 12 Apr. 1907 to the governor’s office, Windhoek. Table A.5 in the appendix offers data on the mixed-race population. 50. Wildenthal, “Race, Gender, and Citizenship,” esp. 267–78. 51. DSWA, L.II.h.3, Bd. 1, 1-4, Vertretende Kaiserliche Bezirksamtmann Blumhagen, Keetmanshoop, 12 Apr. 1907 to the governor’s office, Windhoek, recommended withholding such state benefits as work licenses, the right to purchase of public lands and farms, subsidies for family

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52.

53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

58.

59.

60. 61.

members’ settlement assistance, and war reparations. Hintrager forwarded this report to the chancellor’s office to the hands of the reparations commission, 5-13, state colonial undersecretary Lindequist also received a copy of the report pertaining to the dormitory and promised to work for it in Berlin, 23 Dec. 1907, The proposal did not reach the Women’s League until February 1908, just as it received word of a few openings for genteel women in the north. DSWA, L.II.h.3, Bd. 1, 5-13, Schuckmann to Liliencron, Berlin, 14 Feb. 1908, Bruno von Schuckmann was a conservative sympathizer, a Prussian landowner and administrator in the Colonial Office, who enjoyed a popular reputation in his tenure as governor for his advocacy of settler interests in South West Africa. Lindequist left to become Dernburg’s assistant (Gann and Duignan, Rulers of German Africa, 141, 178, 250). DSWA, L.II.h.3, Bd. 1, 56-56 reverse, excerpt taken from Karl Schmidt, Keetmanshoop to the governor’s office, Windhoek, 4 Jan. 1908; underlining in original. DSWA, L.II.h.3, Bd. 1, 16 and 17, Schmidt report, 29 Sept. 1908; quotation from undated Schmidt’s additional remarks (20). “Aus Keetmanshoop—Ein Sittlichkeitsverbrechen,” LZ 4, no. 19 (11 May 1912). “Aus Windhuk,” LZ 4, no. 31 (3 Aug. 1912). Oermann, Mission, Church and State, 180–81 discusses the incident as the Keetmanshoop affair. Various reports estimate Tissi’s age as somewhere between ten and twelve. Deutsche Kolonial-Handbuch (1912), 2. The figure does not include Rehoboth Basters. The total mixed-race population was 1,647. Hedwig Heyl, “Hauptversammlung,” KH 3, no. 22 (17 July 1910): 8; Ramsey to the Colonial Society, 13 Oct. 1909, DKG, 154, 46. Women’s League secretary Herr Ramsey remarked that the new name would aid in the advertisement of the project. For more on the title’s symbolic meaning, see Freifrau von Richthofen, “Namensänderung des ‘Mädchenheimes’ Keetmanshoop in ‘Heimatshaus des Frauenbundes,’” KH 3, no. 4 (7 Nov. 1909): 8. Chickering, “Casting Their Gaze,” finds the choice of “home” a significant term within the women’s colonial movement, used to signify the appropriateness of German women’s participation in activities that apparently fell outside their accepted domestic sphere of influence. Liliencron moved to Posen to be closer to her married daughter and the Women’s League held its central meetings in Berlin, which made her leadership problematic, Frobenius, “Die Führerinnen,” 3. DSWA 1075.L.II.h.3, Bd. 1, 21-28, Richthofen to Schuckmann, 25 June 1909 and Dernburg, 20 July 1909. Schuckmann to Frauenbund board member Elinor von Wedel, Dresden, 9 Dec. 1909, and 45 on refusal of government subsidy. See also “Aufruf für die Gründung des Heimatshauses in Keetmanshoop,” KH 3, no. 15 (10 Apr. 1910): 8, and “Das Heimatshaus in Keetmanshoop,” KH 3, no. 17 (10 May 1910): 8. Von Richthofen (1853–1910) who served only one year in this position before her death, was born Freiin von Richthofen-Damsdorf in Berlin and married Ferdinand, Freiherr von Richthofen, credited as the father of modern geography, most famous for his research on China. See her obituary, KH 3, no. 14 (27 Mar. 1910): 8. On Hedwig Heyl’s succession, see “Neuwahl der ersten Vorsitzenden,” KH 3, no. 17 (10 May 1910): 8. Membership numbers taken from DKG 154, 130 (Report, 1 Mar. 1909). DKG 154, 130ff, “Denkschrift über die Notwendigkeit des Heimatshauses in Keetmanshoop,” 1 Mar. 1909, “Die Eröffnung des Heimatshauses,” KH 4, no. 7 (1910–11): 8. Hedwig Heyl, geb. Crüsemann (1850–1934) was born in Bremen, the daughter of a prominent businessman. She enjoyed an extensive education at the girl’s school of feminist Henriette Breymann, where she developed an interest in social reform. Soon after leaving school, she married a dye manufacturer and moved to Berlin. There, she soon became known for her philanthropic pursuits, particularly in promoting education in cooking and housekeeping among women of the middle and working classes through the School for Domestic Arts of the Pestalozzi-Froebel House. Wildenthal, “Colonizers and Citizens,” 209–17, and Wilden-

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62. 63.

64. 65.

66.

67. 68.

69.

70. 71.

72.

73.

74.

thal, German Women, 156–68, provide commentary on Heyl’s background and her participation in the women’s colonial movement. See also her autobiography, Hedwig Heyl, Aus meinem Leben (Berlin: Schwetschke und Sohn, 1925). Hedwig Heyl quoted in Heyl, “Das Heimathaus für Frauen in Keetmanshoop (S.W.)” DSWAZ 12, 55 (9 July 1910), Beilage. Reprinted from the Berliner Tageblatt. Heyl, October 1913, to Mecklenburg, DKG 156, 59-72 cited in Venghiattis, “Mobilizing,” 183. Ultimately the dormitory housed 148 women between 1910 and 1914, versus 483 servants who were hired directly. “Kommission für das Heimatshaus,” KH 5, no. 8 (1911–12): 10. Else [Frobenius] von Boetticher, Das Heimathaus in Keetmanshoop/Das Jugendheim in Lüderitzbucht (Berlin: Frauenbund der Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, 1914), 8–10 https:// scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2522&context=sophnf_essay The matron (Oberin) had the right to release women early to meet the great demand for their labor according to “Die Eröffnung des Heimathauses.” Maria Karow, Wo sonst der Fuß des Kriegers trat. Farmerleben in Südwest nach dem Kriege (Berlin: Mittler, 1909), 182. In 1909 Karow complained that her laundress, Zapora, raised her fees from 2 marks per day pay to 4 marks per half-day or 1 mark for each garment. “Schwarze Pläne,” DSWAZ 13, no. 53 (4 July 1911). See also “Wäschereien Schwarzer als Konkurrenz Weisser,” Südwest 3, no. 71 (3 Sept. 1912). N.N., “Ein Brief aus dem Heimatshaus,” KH 4, no. 20 (1910–11): 8. DSWA, L.II.k.1., Bd.2, 6, Hatten to prospective employer (Abschrift), 1 Oct. 1910. Government of South West Africa to the Women’s League, 22 Nov. 1910. See also p. 2, 28 Feb. 1911, Governor’s office to Bezirksamt Keetmanshoop. DSWA, L.II.k.1., Bd.2, 40, Letter from Heyl to the government of South West Africa, 19 Jan. 1911 containing an unidentified newspaper clipping (with some of the words obstructed), “Deutsche Dienstmädchen in Südwestafrika,” which Heyl claimed was “published in all the largest newspapers in Germany.” DSWA, L.II.k.1., Bd.2, 4, Keetmanshooper Bezirksamtmann to Governor’s office, 27 Mar. 1911. DSWA, L.II.k.4., Bd.1, 30. Böhmer to the governor’s office 9 Aug. 1910. Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft, 228–29 gives the following figures for the rapidly rising immigrant population of Kapjungen (Cape Boys) inclusive of women and children: 1,429 in 1909, 2,825 in 1910, and a height of 7,026 in 1911, followed by a decline to 4,173 in 1912 and 2,648 in 1913. He notes that South Africans made up 80 to 90 percent of the immigrant non-white labor force that included West Africa, Togo, Cameroon, Abyssinia, India, and the West Indies. DSWA F.IV.r.1, Bd.1, 59, Missionary C[arl] Wandres, Windhoek, to Deputy Governor Hintrager, Windhoek, 24 May 1910. Wandres remarked, “The washer-women are in many cases individuals of doubtful reputation and half-whites stem in large part from this occupation group.” DKG 156, 44a, quote from Windhoek chapter head of the Colonial Society Dr. Findeisen to the Society office, Berlin, 1 Oct. 1913, who described the imported maids’ limitations as workers explicitly. In southern Africa Iris Berger, Threads of Solidarity: Women in South African Industry, 1900–1980 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 34–35, finds women preferred employment in shops and cafés to domestic service, and that such positions in the Cape and the Witwatersrand paid 20 percent and 13 percent more respectively than servants received. Bar girls were stigmatized because they were in a job where clients perceived them as sexually available. Maria Eugenia Fernández-Esquer and Maria Carolina Agoff, “Drinking and Working in a Cantina: Misrecognition and the Threat of Stigma,” Culture, Health & Sexuality 14, no. 3–4 (2012): 407–20, esp. 408.

 Part II

Colonial Gossip, Moral Panics, and Racial Conflict

  CHAPTER 4

The Malice of Native Women

In 1913 an anonymous German settler woman in South West Africa penned a letter to the local newspaper testifying to the growing frustration and anger of white women toward their African maids. Her particular grievance focused on the territorial ban on corporal punishment for African women: “For myself the point that I find the most wounding is the stipulation that the native women cannot be forced to work, nor be flogged. They know it only too well, and their conduct reflects it.”1 The angry housewife captures one view of the complexity and tensions of domestic service relations in white households. This chapter examines the role gender played in the escalating racial hostilities and violence between domestics and employers in settler homes from the official end of the Herero and Nama Wars in 1907 through the end of colonial rule. Though such corporal punishment violated official policy, evidence in this chapter details extensive mistreatments of African servant women. As white settlers grew increasingly wary of their African domestic workers’ insubordination, they voiced paranoid fantasies of the dangers that black maids allegedly posed to their families in order to justify repression and violence against them. As the introduction to this book discusses, exploring the relationship between gossip and rumor in the local context offers a lens into the anxieties and traumas of the settler community. The burgeoning historiography on violence in South West Africa during and after the Herero and Nama Wars also confirms the growing resistance of Africans in response to whites’ disrespect and mistreatment, potentially enflaming rumors of African plots or a race war against whites. As Africans began to assert themselves individually and collectively in response to settlers’ abuse, whites responded even more violently. German officials brought a spate of criminal cases against white employers and others for severe injuries and murders of African workers, especially after 1910. But these cases, which likely represented only a small fraction of such incidents, demonstrated the racism of the German colonial courts to Africans: there, white witnesses’ testimony trumped that of Africans, and white translators’ ignorance and prejudice sometimes skewed the proceedings. If colonial courts

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even found whites guilty, their sentences were extremely lenient by comparison with blacks.2 Within the existing scholarship, however, there has been little specific attention to the significance of gender in motivating interracial violence in South West Africa. As this chapter details, the postwar shortage of labor and the official policy of compulsory employment brought increasing numbers of African women into employment in whites’ homes. As developed below, white women could not give voice to their anxieties about possible sexual liaisons between their husbands and black women, and their complaints about black maids may have masked much of their resentment and hostility about such relations. Indeed, officials and others speculated that domestic employment was a key source of racial mixing in the colony, and established policies that sought to prevent and punish such intimacies. The anonymous German housewife quoted above was one of many that alleged that German administrators allowed some African wives to escape paid employment in favor of caring for their own families. Increasingly, white settlers began to decry the legal ban on white employers’ corporal punishment of working African women, as well as their perception that German officials failed to force more African women to work. German settlers gradually escalated this newspaper campaign, spreading rumors of the growing unruliness of African servant women and the need for colonial authorities to repress them in order to ensure the continued safety of white settler women. The letter-writer depicted the tense situation dramatically, calling on colonial organizations and officials to defend white women’s interests. Popular appeals such as hers to white male chivalry and German men’s patriarchal right to protect white women served as key justifications for this violence.

Historical Background Even before the Herero and Nama Wars, Germans in South West Africa spoke of the difficulty in attracting and retaining good African servants. Settler women, particularly those on isolated ranches and farmsteads, reported their heavy reliance on African workers to draw water, chop wood, cook, clean, and launder, and to care for their gardens, poultry, and/or dairy herds. The anonymous “C.” described the situation in a short article from 1898 in the Colonial Society’s newspaper, The German Colonial Newspaper: “The work that falls to women consists . . . chiefly in the care of kitchen and house. The former is not well left entrusted to native menservants or maids, since these are only useful for the menial housework. . . . Here a fundamental oversight on the side of the housewife is necessary.”3 Her description underlines both her contempt for her servants as well as her strict supervision of their working lives. Settler women’s accounts also represented individual African maids as dangerously attractive. They suggested that cunning young Afri-

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can women eagerly sought white male admirers whose patronage would free them from domestic work. German women writers also regularly complained that their domestic workers were unsatisfactory in other ways as well: dirty, thieving, recalcitrant, lazy, and untrainable.4 Though colonial employers could legally flog African men over the age of fifteen, after 1896 it was illegal in the German colonies (at least on paper) to apply corporal discipline to African women. Many German women stated they preferred to hire African men and boys over women as servants if it was possible. For example, memoirist Margarethe von Eckenbrecher described a strong preference for male African servants over women when given the choice. Eckenbrecher claimed that she had her farmstead’s washing and ironing done in an outer building to avoid her female personnel. She saw no gender contradictions in hiring African men servants for cleaning her household and working in her kitchen, but she did view women laundresses as “indispensable.”5 Likewise, the unmarried journalist Clara Brockmann also stated that she preferred male servants (so-called houseboys) in her home. She nonetheless wrote after the Herero War that Herero women, presumably prisoners of war, were especially talented at washing and ironing because they could learn proper standards of cleanliness when given the right instruction.6 German women’s domestic writings from South West Africa suggest a loose sexual division of labor for most housework in the South West African territory, except laundry. Laundry was a feminine household task that, unlike cooking, a white housewife supervised but did not perform. Their anecdotal evidence collectively establishes a picture of a highly mobile, often reluctant corps of African servants, whose sex was a product either of chance or employers’ stereotypes. Settler women’s memoirs give the impression that many simply recruited servants wherever they could, as little external (state) regulation against forcible recruiting existed prior to the Herero and Nama Wars. After the African wars, however, the nature of domestic service changed forever in the colony. As the white settler population of territory grew and African numbers declined, the German Colonial Society and its Women’s League not only assisted hundreds of white maids with free passage to emigrate to the colony, but also subsidized the settlement of hundreds more German fiancées and wives. The organizations were caught in the middle between these two sides in many disputes: the settler woman, many of whom received free passages themselves and might even be members of local chapters, versus recruited German servants. German officials in the colony managed the African servant supply, but also enforced the society’s servant contracts. Bachelor German administrators sometimes employed their own servants. As the previous chapter documented, district officers manipulated the servant labor market and wages to encourage the hiring of cheap white maids as they sought to prevent white settler men’s sexual contact with their African domestics.

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The Postwar Labor Shortage Settlers were complaining that the African labor force was inadequate for their needs before the Herero War. By 1911 one German estimated the overall shortfall of African workers in the colonial economy at fifteen thousand.7 Studies indicate that the colonial administration’s native ordinances had established a half-free labor market that reduced the surviving Africans’ potential for insurrection through mandatory labor and limited mobility, but offered little protection to them as workers. Officials regularly assigned African workers to large, white-owned cattle farms through the native ordinances, but individual farmers and small holders living on outlying homesteads were empowered to enforce these ordinances, some even going so far as to conduct searches in the bush in order to capture new work hands for their farms. Thus, the already-blurry wartime distinction between state and private authority over African workers grew still more obscure in peacetime. Widespread violence among white settler men toward Africans continued after the Herero and Nama Wars, but the colonial administration’s new oversight over forced African labor now gave the police a central role in mediating labor disputes with white employers. The available scholarship concludes that German administrators also seem to have tolerated much of the violence that white settlers inflicted on their captive African workers. Colonial police brought charges against white employers in the most egregious cases of abuse, and the resulting punishments, even for the murder of Africans were usually mild.8 The distribution of Africans as potential workers for German colonists varied greatly throughout the colony. In districts where fewer potential African workers resided, German officials directly controlled the work contracts and supplied captive African laborers to farmers. The colonial bureaucracy, as part of its new interventions in the labor market, also spelled out the minimum wages and dietary requirements for African laborers, forbidding actual enslavement of workers. In-migrating South Africans, Ovambo laborers from self-ruling Northern Ovamboland or Angola, and workers of color from Asia and other regions also made up some of the postwar labor pool, especially in the colony’s copper and diamond mines and in railroad construction. The native ordinances did not apply to Ovambo and foreign workers, and could not be used to coerce them directly. In 1910, for instance, Cape Colony officials protested when German protectorate forces massacred fourteen protesting South African railroad laborers in Wilhelmstal.9 By administering work conditions and assignments for African workers, German colonial officials in South West Africa also exposed themselves to white settlers’ complaints about inadequate numbers of available workers and their unsatisfactory performance. Colonial newspapers commonly voiced Germans’ anger about insufficient, insubordinate, runaway, or lax indigenous laborers. Resentful white settlers occasionally accused German police and bureaucrats of showing preference in supplying workers to a few well-connected employers and even of selfishly employing too many servants in their personal households.10

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In addition, the state and employers found it desirable to preserve what they perceived as the traditional family sexual divisions of labor within the different African ethnic groups. For example, in instances where an urban Herero man and Herero woman formed a couple in local African housing quarters, werfts, German officials often seem to have assigned the man to heavy labor but left his wife to care for their presumed children. German officials’ long-term strategy aimed to revive Africans’ reproduction, and this may have led them to encourage these women to turn their energies toward motherhood rather than to paid labor. The pastoral Herero society likewise traditionally delegated cattle-herding responsibilities to men and boys and milking to women, and German farmers often complained that they would not exchange gender roles easily. The terms of the state labor contracts gave Africans the right to terminate their contracts with four weeks’ notice, which whites claimed enabled African men to balk at undesirable assignments and to shield African women from labor altogether. As one “old Farmer” wrote in to local press, if Africans could choose their employers, then they “would never need to work at all”: “I have very good men, but the women, the women! One little episode: It was very cold and the wife of my best native workman struck from her milking. I ask her why she would not milk, and she answers that her child is sick. She was holding her child in her arms, and it was completely naked despite the cold. I suggested that she should cover her child in a blanket, so that it would not get sicker, and I went away. Suddenly her husband came and declared that I had insulted his wife. They were leaving at the end of the month.”11 Indeed, the author added that the African women on his ranch refused to do more than milk. The contemporary economist Johannes Gad completed a statistical study of agricultural production in Hereroland after the Herero and Nama Wars that substantiates that the same pattern of sexual division of labor was common to most postwar colonial farms.12

African Women Resist White Employment Gad studied thirty-six larger and medium-size German-owned farms in Hereroland, where the African workforce was overwhelmingly Herero and, to a lesser extent, Damara. The laboring population apparently was composed of more populous, multigenerational extended families than those found on smaller farms’ werfts. On these farms, more than two hundred African men and teenage boys occupied positions as workers and herdsmen; no adult men and only ten teenage boys worked in the farm kitchens. In contrast, these same farms invariably had one to ten female African kitchen laborers, but almost twice as many women worked in farm dairies—almost 150 women altogether. In fact, the ratio of agricultural personnel to domestic help was 100:12 on the largest farms. Gad’s study also counted many fewer female African employees than male employees, and calculated their sex ratio 59:100, despite the preponderance of women in the surviving postwar

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population. On these larger farms Herero families apparently preserved their traditional sexual divisions of labor whenever possible, leaving care of the family dwelling and of young children and the infirm to women relatives. Gad indicates that milking, though a part-time job, remained Herero women’s main paid occupation.13 Gad further interpreted the skewed sex ratios of workers to mean that larger colonial farms were not sufficiently tapping the available pool of African women’s labor, but noted that African men did not want their wives to work for whites: “The men are very sensitive when those in a werft are not being served well enough by their wives. So, calling on too great a number of women from one particular werft in the past has often been cause for disagreements.”14 Given the official coercion enforcing African work discipline in the colony, it is difficult to gauge African families’ influence in the labor allocations on settlers’ farms, yet many Germans claimed that the worker shortage gave Africans considerable leverage.15 Whether German employers and state officials, African men, or African women had the greatest impact in determining the sexual breakdown of labor, Gad’s evidence demonstrates that many Herero women were able to resist working in colonists’ homes despite the labor shortage. Gad’s study also showed that Herero women on the farm werfts need not perform wage work in order to eat. The legally dictated bulk ration system in place on most colonial farms guaranteed regular weekly provisions of salt, sugar, meal, coffee, and tobacco to resident native families, assuring a steady source of food for non-wage-earning persons as well as farm employees. This practice was necessary, however, to enable Herero survival, let alone reproduction. Notably, Gad still complained that often the rations were too paltry even to ensure the continued health of resident African families, and often did not even contain the Herero dietary staple, milk.16 By necessity, then, African families relied on all their members to supplement these basic provisions with hunting and gathering (or even theft) of food or livestock, so unemployed family members may have occupied themselves foraging or stealing food. Thus, the state-run labor system both intentionally and unintentionally deemphasized African women’s paid domestic work in settlers’ homes, and instead relegated African women to care for their own families and homes. By preference, African women likely were glad to avoid notoriously exploitative, marginally paid domestic service, while German officials allocated the majority of African men to work at other tasks than housework, including more-demanding and often dangerous heavy labor in farms and mines.17 Farmers’ complaints printed in colonial newspapers bitterly accused German officials of shielding the African women from paid work, as well as misallocating too many laborers as servants who were more needed on their farms. They complained about the high numbers of African servants caring for the troops, government officials, and other private citizens. Colonial homesteaders demanded greater accounting of the current assignment of labor and insisted that police better enforce mandatory labor of “every healthy [indigenous] person of male and female

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sex above 14 full years in age.”18 Amidst the many white settler complaints about African workers—including their high wages, poor productivity, recalcitrance, and frequent escapes—lay the assumption that the Africans were collectively thumbing their noses at German authority: “Every native man keeps half a dozen wives, who are too lazy to work and do nothing but lie by the fire. Unemployed natives must be forced to present themselves to the police or the Native Commission.”19 Furious German housewives wrote to the local newspapers that many potential servants for their homes were readily available in werfts, if the police would only intervene.20 A contemporary German farmer’s wife in South West Africa alleged an elaborate plot had evolved Africans on her farm to avoid paid work. Her essay, “Women’s Work in South West Africa,” datelined from Farm Nunab, in the Rehoboth district, July 1910, depicted how her family’s farmstead drew its workers from a Khoekhoen encampment in its perimeters, but that the farm employed various Herero and Damara laborers as well. She summarized a series of troubles with her domestic staff: First, her kitchen lad (Bambusen, a derogatory term taken from the German word for baboon) stole meat right out of the pot. After he received twenty-five lashes as corporal punishment, he quit. His replacement, a male Damara youth, served quite ably as her assistant for several weeks but disappeared soon thereafter, when his father recommended another post to him. Next, two Herero maids, “Sara” and “Marie,” made excuses to leave. Finally, the author allegedly discovered that a “Hottentot [derogatory]” on her farm’s werft was driving away her servants because he wanted her to hire one of his own people, who could pilfer food from her kitchen to feed his whole werft. But, the author refused, preferring to work alone.21 Her story inflated the common occurrence of African servants’ turnover as a more organized and more sinister African conspiracy. Others did as well. White settlers vehemently decried the official ban against corporal punishment for African women as enabling their collective defiance. The anonymous settler woman’s letter to the editor cited at the opening of this chapter even appealed to the Woman’s League demanding the league’s intervention on behalf of her fellow settler wives to support corporal punishment of African women: It is not enough that white women in this country are here to dedicate themselves to their [the Africans’] cultural uplift and should be supported by the government, not only with sweet words but with concrete assistance. Instead, we have to work harder, and, thanks to the shortage of white personnel, contend with the laziness, recalcitrance, and malice of native women. . . . It is high time that the Women’s League of the German Colonial Society tackled the martyrdom of us white women–for that is what it is!—and demand from the government that we white women be given a specific guarantee [of their support] . . . If such a guarantee is not forthcoming, then the Women’s League must suspend sending women and girls out here and warn them against emigrating.22

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Her letter implored the league to pressure colonial officials to impose the native ordinances’ labor requirement equally on African women, as well as to permit corporal discipline against them, to ensure the ready, obedient, female domestic workforce. However, the league’s general secretary in Berlin, Gertrud von Hatten, wrote a rebuttal rejecting the notion that German housewives needed to resort to corporal punishment of their African maids. Hatten claimed to have conducted inquiries throughout South West Africa that unanimously revealed that “women [settlers] who know how to handle their natives correctly seldom have complaint.” After all, she explained, German women’s cultural mission in the colonies dictated that the ideal German mistress civilize her African retainers to the standards of proper German housework, and mold her staff into obedient, capable servants. Hatten further cautioned that German housewives must avoid expecting too much of their servants, implying that, while African domestics could supply raw labor, only a German housewife or servant could be capable of maintaining a true German home.23 Hatten also charged that colonial officials did not need to hire so many African maids for their own homes, and insisted that German men should employ African houseboys rather than settling for substandard African women’s housekeeping, “Bambusinnenwirtschaft.”24 Her insulting neologism for black maids feminized a pejorative term for African houseboys. Her remarks subtly neutralize the attractiveness of African maids. One suspects that jealousy and sexual tensions underlay at least some of the conflicts between white women and their black maids. Contrary to Hatten’s suggestion that settler wives should oppose corporal punishment of their domestics, however, many German women in South West Africa described beating their servants or sending them to the police for discipline. Indeed, Clara Brockmann openly stated her preference for male servants was due to this policy, “One can send a [native] boy to the police and have him count to 25 [lashes]; and, in fact, that is the only deterrent. No wonder, that boys in general obey better, and wenches [Weiber] lean toward carelessness and indifference.” 25

Violent Treatment of Black Women Workers German officials not only seemed to be more eager to protect African women from corporal discipline, but they also were less prone to view a woman as a potential threat compared to African men. Therefore, German police seem to have pressed criminal charges against whites primarily in cases where African women employees, especially pregnant women, were maimed or killed. These cases were easier to prove because white settler men had broad rights to discipline their male African workers and defend their families from alleged danger.26 However, settler men’s chivalry often served as their most potent defense for their acts of violence against Africans.

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For example, in the notorious criminal case of Farmer Paul Wiehager of the Outjo District, prosecutors claimed Wiehager engaged in a broad pattern of violence against his African workers as well as the population in the surrounds of his farm. (In one account, during a fit of drunken bravado during the war, he attempted to line up a group of Khoekhoen to demonstrate how many he could kill with one bullet.) German officials, however, singled out Wiehager’s murder of two African women and a girl for prosecution. Wiehager was brought to trial for shooting a Herero woman, Zarote, for running away from her farm work in February or March 1906. A second charge alleged that, in October 1906, Wiehager trussed another, elderly woman and young girl of unknown African ethnicity against a pair of trees and left them without food or water overnight. The next morning, after they had nearly expired from exposure, he ordered his overseer to shoot them— ostensibly to end their suffering. Wiehager and his wife both testified in his defense that during his absence his wife gave the original order to their Rehoboth Baster farm overseer Wilhelm to fetch the two fugitive workers from their huts and bind them out in the sun. Upon his return, Wiehager ordered the two moved out of sight to spare his wife’s tender feelings. He claimed he had intended to leave the two Africans exposed for only for a few hours, but subsequently forgot to release them. Thus, the defense made clear that Wiehager’s wife was complicit in the mistreatment of the two women and stressed, furthermore, that his executions of them came on her behalf, to spare her from the sight of her half-dead victims.27 German and local newspapers commented on Wiehager’s brutality in the wake of the case. The German South West African Newspaper editorialized in dismay that this one exceptional case might serve as proof to misguided Germans in the homeland who sympathized with colonial Africans and believed that settlers’ mistreatment of them had caused the Herero and Nama Wars. The newspaper piece also remarked that although Wiehager had overstepped the police authority granted to him in administering corporal punishment, that much of the fault for Wiehager’s behavior lay in the trying economic circumstances of the colony and their impact on his farm, “In Southwest Africa, besides his many other difficulties, the farmer must concern himself especially with two main threats to his enterprise, the escape of the native worker and cattle theft by his own people or by unknown, freely roaming natives.”28 The newspaper thereby asserted that the exactment of the death penalty was justified for Africans who abandoned their white employers or stole German settlers’ cattle. According to the author’s logic, white settlers’ deadly violence against Africans was a reasonable response to the ongoing labor shortage in the colony. Because white farmers particularly blamed the police for their failures to prevent African workers’ escapes or to capture thieving Africans in the bush, their rationales also suggested that German officials had failed Wiehager and others who murdered African workers. But colonial officials countered that fleeing African workers often left due to intolerable work conditions and mistreatment. Historians have alleged that during

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the era of forced labor many German administrators simply returned fugitive laborers to abusive employers and even assigned further captive laborers even in the face of African workers’ complaints. For example, Windhoek district officer Narciß noted in 1907 that African maids in the employ of a local tavern keeper named Hülsmann fled from him several times within two months. Although the women testified convincingly that they had escaped because Hülsmann lashed them with a weapon commonly used for corporal punishment in colonial Southern Africa, a Schambock, a long, semi-flexible heavy leather whip swung like a rod. Police captured and returned the women five times. Although Narciß had found the women’s complaints credible, during this same period officials still assigned Hülsmann two additional female African workers. Hülsmann baldly complained in a letter to the editor of the local paper that he was not allowed to discipline his workers physically, and not even Windhoek police would beat his recalcitrant female workers, but only jail them: “Locking them up is no use to me, then I certainly would have no workers.”29 Despite the supposed official colonial proscription against striking African women, police records show Narciß often ordered corporal discipline against African women. In another notable case in 1908, two African women sought help from the Rehoboth police due to their employers’ mistreatment. Historians allege a pattern in which German officials and settlers did not take injuries against Africans seriously; courts did not punish employers’ violence, even deadly mistreatment with severe sentences.30 After January 1908 all Herero prisoners of war were released from their legal bondage and thereafter were supposedly free to contract themselves with new employers, if they wished. However, the new labor ordinance decreed that any natives who resigned from their work were to report to the local police or district office with their passbooks for reassignment. An outraged white farmer related a more telling description of his labor recruitment practices in the local newspaper. In April 1912, after his African workers ran away, he claimed to do as German police privately had advised: he captured an African woman and compelled her to reveal the site of her group’s encampment in the bush. There, he found a number of huts, but only a young boy and a number of women. So, he lay in wait and captured four African men upon their return from food gathering and hunting. Although he forcibly removed everyone who could walk back to his farm, all of them soon disappeared in the night—one even broke through chains to do so. He claimed they stole from him as they fled, but left their passbooks behind on a rock. Even more chilling, he recommended permanently tattooing work-able Africans’ skins with their pass numbers, “as many advocate” to help with the problem of identifying runaway workers.31 Despite organized efforts at increasing the immigration of German maids to South West Africa, their numbers apparently did not reduce a shortage of domestic workers in white settlers’ homes. Colonial newspapers continued to voice Germans’ frustration with the unavailability of African servants as well as the prevailing

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high wages for domestics. Some German officials refused to supply further workers to employers who abused the Africans assigned to them, which only drove German colonists to shackle or otherwise imprison their remaining workers. The most infamous of these was the notorious Ludwig Cramer. After 1910 German colonial authorities investigated and brought an increasing number of criminal cases against a handful of German colonists, including the aforementioned Wiehager, as well as Ludwig Cramer, for the murders of African female servants and retainers. Officials seem to have tolerated Germans’ forceful treatment of African female servants up to a point, and intervened only in egregious cases, such as severe injuries or deaths. Indeed, Cramer and others invoked a longstanding German legal protection, claiming that they had the paternal right of correction to punish their workers corporally. German authorities rarely stepped in, even where they knew considerable mistreatment had occurred, in part because the German community seems to have justified its violence against Africans as normal in the wake of continued brigandage after the official end to the colonial wars. The pattern of violence of the Cramer case was extreme, however.

The Cramer Case Even before German officials lodged charges against Cramer, it was clear that they suspected pervasive mistreatment of African workers on Ludwig Cramer’s farm in Otjisororindi in Gobabis. Gobabis district officer Dr. Weber noted an extreme shortage of African workers in the region was threatening its farms. Archival records indicate German settlers there regularly sought pardons for their jailed native workers–even some who had been incarcerated for violent offenses—in order to reclaim their labor.32 Weber fully approved Cramer’s request in August 1910 to the Colonial Society for two unnamed white maids to be recruited for him in Germany, despite his refusal to specify a wage for them. Cramer sought the maids to work as cheaply as possible: “Cramer will offer [his] two maids food and shelter and pay them a salary commensurate with their productivity. . . . With regard to Cramer’s application, I remark confidentially that he has complained incessantly about the shortage of native workers, which in my opinion is caused by the fact that he does not really know how to treat the natives.” 33 Since Cramer was in great financial difficulties and his wife was ill, he next applied to the Colonial Society and the Women’s League for maids. Gobabis district officer Weber, again undercut Cramer’s applications, citing his history of mistreating his African workers. Other sources make clear that Cramer had applied for the immigrant German maids in part because the Herero women on his farm had refused to do his family’s housework.34 Had German officials intervened to protect Cramer’s African servants as readily as they had German ones, tragedy might have been averted. Instead, in August 1912

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Ludwig Cramer faced charges of deadly violence against several African women before the Windhoek District Court. The Swakopmund Newspaper related the bare-bones summary of the accusations. Cramer, who had emigrated from Warburg, Germany, faced ten counts of assault of varying degrees of severity against his African farm hands and servants that took place between late December 1911 and early February 1912. The list of these charges details a pattern of escalating violence: he first shackled three Herero women in a confined kneeling or squatting positions, day through night, each for three or four days on end during December and early January—Wahe, Sosine (also known as Josephine or Josine), and Alwine. He went so far as to lash Alwine with a Schambock until she bled. Later, in a frenzied period during the final days from 27 January to 1 February, he unleashed a maelstrom: he beat his Herero worker Magdalena and used deadly force against two additional female employees, the Herero woman Amalia as well as a Damara-Herero woman named Auma (also known as Maria). In addition, he struck a pregnant Herero woman named Konturu with a stick and a Schambock until she bled, and then repeatedly kicked her in the head and stomped on her belly. Cramer stamped on the abdomen of another heavily pregnant Khoekhoe woman named Grunas as well. Both Grunas and Konturu suffered miscarriages. Despite the seriousness of these charges, the prosecution recommended a mere three-andone-half year sentence. The proceedings began on a Friday and ended before noon Saturday, spanning only one and a half days. Cramer was convicted of eight counts (but was acquitted of beating Wahe and Sosine) and was sentenced to a year and nine months in prison and fined the cost of the trial. Upon appeal, his sentence was reduced further to four months and a 2,700-mark fine, plus partial trial costs.35 The German South West African Newspaper was more descriptive in its report, clarifying Cramer’s side of the story in sympathy with his actions. Cramer claimed that he imprisoned the women in chains because he feared they would otherwise escape into the bush. He admitted to imprisoning Sosine only for a day, not four days as she had alleged. He stated that he struck her only lightly with the Schambock. In excusing his actions, he noted that several of his cattle were missing, and he therefore had made the herding women answer for it by beating them or locking them up. “Meanwhile, he learned from a native that there had been poisoning attempts against him on his farm.” He noted that police inquiries at the Gobabis headquarters pointed to a kitchen maid called Rupertina and his Damara farmworker July’s wife and children, who worked as house servants, as potential poisoners. In sum, Cramer claimed his violence had been unavoidable: “He had found himself in a constant state of self-defense against his natives, because he must exercise in continual vigilance against new poisoning attempts.”36 The trial transcripts (both the original case and subsequent appeals) suggest that German officials and police dismissed Cramer’s claims of a poisoning conspiracy, yet Cramer’s testimony and his wife Ada’s subsequent memoirs demonstrate convincingly that all of Cramer’s actions had been motivated by fears of a poison

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plot. He began to suspect Africans were conspiring to poison his family after several mysterious deaths among his cattle, when his wife Ada herself suffered an unexplained digestive upset. As even official accounts make clear, Cramer violently questioned his workers in order to find where their poison was hidden. His decision to call for a police interrogation of his workers in January 1912, coupled with the subsequent arrest of one of his workers, only fed his suspicions and led him to even more violent interrogations against the remaining Africans on his farm.37 Two of Cramer’s African workers, Rupertine and July, admitted the poisonings after suffering several blows from Cramer and further physical discipline at the hands of the police interrogator. Both confessed to poisoning the Cramer family, but they depicted acts of poisoning that were ceremonial rather than literal. Rupertine, for example, admitted to placing a sliver of wood from the former Herero warlord Katoakonga’s war club (kirri) in her mistress’s tea to “poison” her. July, who had a reputation as a healer, claimed to have placed herbal powders in the Cramer’s fire. He was arrested, but when police tested his cache of herbs on animals, no harm came to them. Clearly, Cramer had elicited deep hatred from his African workers, and their actions bespoke efforts to curse their employers according to local African customs, but there was no scientific proof of actual poisoning that could hold up in a German court. Still, Cramer was convinced that if police continued to investigate, they would find the substance killing their cattle and sickening his family. When the police gave up the search, Cramer remained driven to find the poison hidden among his African workers himself, by any means necessary.38 First, Cramer seized and tortured two female farm hands, Auma and Amalia, demanding they reveal their caches of poison. He beat them so severely that both women subsequently died from their mistreatment. Cramer’s abuses now took on a disturbingly sexual tone: he tied the women up, cut off their outer clothing, then searched them for poison hidden beneath their clothing. His wife testified she had suggested to her husband that he bind the women’s hands to prevent them from attacking him with poisoned arrows hidden in their garments. She asked him to refrain from removing the women’s underskirts, but later asserted that if only he had, he would certainly have found their concealed poison—presumably secreted in their genitals. Indeed, Ludwig Cramer even claimed to have found a small bag of sandy powder stashed behind the loincloth of one of the women. He believed it to be a powerful poison, but alleged the concoction vanished mysteriously before he could have it tested. Cramer eventually also tortured the high-born and pregnant Konturu, the wife of the Herero captain Katoakonda, in order to reveal the source of the poison. He reportedly hit her until she fell, and then had her supported while he continued the blows. Only after his daughter Hildegard intervened to prevent the death of the woman did he stop the beating. He then confined Konturu in chains and searched her entire body for poison, using his fingers to probe her vaginal cavity. Finally, he stomped on her abdomen, which caused one of the miscarriages listed on his charge sheet.39

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Was Cramer displacing rape fantasies onto his victims? Cramer’s interrogations may represent the “staging of a sadistic fantasy” as reflected in Ada Cramer’s depictions.40 Nonetheless, the outlines of this fantasy conform to a specific pattern of paranoia, which was shared by other German colonists, conforming to a series of rumors of other poisonings spread among settlers by word of mouth and in German newspaper reports in the district during this period. Cramer’s fantasies and fears revealed his fixation that African women’s bodies were poisonous. Cramer’s deep fascination with the dangerous toxins concealed in his female workers’ sexual and reproductive organs and his particular violence toward their fetuses would seem otherwise inexplicable, if not for the surrounding context to the trial identifying African women’s sexuality as insidious and even secretly poisonous. At Cramer’s appeal Farmer Erich von Michaelis, who had resided in the colony for seventeen years, testified, “The only poison, that the Herero are familiar with is oukwejo which is identical to menstrual blood.”41 Another expert witness gave evidence that, among its uses, the herbal remedy in July’s possession, omugaigai, was used primarily as an abortifacient. A third witness claimed the herb was so powerful that it had saved her life after a difficult childbirth.42 In sum, expert testimony regarding local Africans’ knowledge of poisons served to depict the local cultures as having access to sexual toxins and to associate African women, in particular, with harnessing these dangerous sexual and reproductive powers. According to this disturbed logic, German police officers had failed to recognize or punish the hidden dangers that African women posed to German colonists. The poisoning rumors that circulated in Gobabis District between 1911 through 1912 marked a period of particularly acute shortages of African workers, which ratcheted up local racial tensions and white anxieties.

Rumors of Poisoning in Gobabis District In December 1911, a month before the confrontation on Cramer’s farm, Frau Elisabeth Ohlsen was tried and acquitted of clubbing to death her male Damara servant and farm hand, Doiweb, a suspected poisoner. Like Cramer, Ohlsen feared a silent conspiracy among her farm workers and servants to poison her cattle, though they were Nama, not Herero. She testified how she gradually became aware of the hidden danger. Her overseer first accused her farm worker, Lukas, of possessing a powdery substance that he had rubbed on the cow’s udders during milking and used to contaminate the farm’s well. Next, Frau Ohlsen’s suspicions shifted to her kitchen personnel. One day she noticed that a silver spoon had become oddly discolored. Ohlsen questioned her kitchen maid, Rebekka, who claimed her mother had urged her to poison her employer’s food. Ohlsen claimed she had proof that meat had been poisoned as well.43

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Fearful for her life, Ohlsen continued her investigation. She questioned her young servant boy, Joseph, who implicated a series of female culprits at work in Ohlsen’s kitchen. He claimed Anna, a younger wife of his father, carried poison in a satchel on her back and took it out when she was alone in the kitchen. He stated that Rebekka’s sister, Katharina, had contaminated the Ohlsens’ food on another occasion. Ohlsen claimed that her African workers admitted to her that other Africans throughout the colony regularly poisoned whites without their knowledge. Ohlsen related that the alleged poison was undetectable, according to Rebekka’s mother, Kanuchas: “The whites believed it was is an illness when someone slowly sickened through the workings of the poison. They had a name for this disease, and when the poisoned person finally died, they said that he had perished from this ailment.”44 Newspaper reports of Ohlsen’s story were readily available to Cramer.45 During the Ohlsen trial, police watchman Horschich corroborated that Rebekka had confessed to poisoning rice and coffee in the Ohlsen’s home. However, the head surgeon Dr. Mayer diagnosed Ohlsen with paranoia. Ohlsen refused to drink coffee served her at the far-off Windhoek Catholic hospital, asserting, “All [the] natives, even those in Windhoek, were trying to kill them.”46 Her fearfulness eventually led to her to strike a prostrate farm hand, whom she perceived was attacking her, crushing his skull. In the course of the subsequent criminal proceedings, the German authorities eventually found that she was not guilty by reason of self-defense. The local German farmer’s association of Gobabis publicly dismissed Ohlsen and her husband’s claims of a poisoning conspiracy, attributing the couple’s supposedly inexplicable loss of cattle to a known disease and condemning their brutal mistreatment of their African workers.47 German bureaucrats regarded the Ohlsens’ and Cramers’ poisoning claims more cynically as bids to win restitution from the government for their cattle losses from disease, and feared other German settlers might join in their demands. Archival records demonstrate the local district officer’s disbelief in the Ohlsens’ and Cramers’ poisoning allegations and his eagerness to squelch their “machinations, which entail enormous dangers from the remaining farmers.” Nevertheless, a third, unrelated newspaper story also appeared in December 1911, reporting that the farmer Baron von Tiesenhausen, on Farm Schweinsberg, also of the Gobabis district, suffered a case of arsenic poisoning. Arsenic, presumably from copper dip, an insecticide used to rid cattle of flies, was found in his coffee. Two unnamed other whites were rumored to have become ill from the poisonous brew as well. The paper sought to dispel settlers’ unease by recommending that every unexplained illness not be attributed to African servants’ poisoning plots. No further mention or explanation for the incident appeared in the colonial press, but a government advisory earlier in the month warning that natives in the Kuiseb area had poisoned some waterholes in order to capture game may have aggravated colonists’ worries—Ludwig Cramer

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specifically mentioned his concern over similar reports of poisoned waterholes to his neighbors.48

Rumors Spread Because after the Cramer case German colonists were especially mindful of African servants’ potential for danger and hypervigilant to the possibility of poisoning, they may have begun to voice suspicion whenever any unexplained human and livestock illness or death took place. News reports also indicate that the next poisoning accusation case emerged outside Gobabis. The tumultuous case of Martha Sindemaaß, a sixteen-year-old Damara in charge of caring for her employer’s infant son, aptly demonstrates how she became the target of her employers’ accusations that she had poisoned her young charge. After Sindemaaß had worked in the household of the German official Fritz Rall in Gammams in District Windhoek for six months, he and his wife asserted that she had begun making insolent statements and acting rebelliously. When Rall beat her for her alleged insolence, she ran away. Police searched for her for eight days. Upon locating her, they returned her to the Rall household, despite her complaints of abuse there.49 Allegedly, the next time she was left alone with the Rall’s infant son, the baby cried out sharply. Frau Rall hurried to his side and found his “whole body blue from the exertion of his screaming, his forehead covered with cold sweat, his eyes dark and shadowed.” The baby appeared to be convulsing and choking. She administered a purgative, reportedly causing him to emit greenish, foul vomit and a slimy, bloody stool, but he recovered later that evening. The newspaper account claims that the child’s mother soon became convinced that Sindemaaß had poisoned her baby’s teething ring and then immediately disposed of his bodily wastes to conceal her crime. There was no physical proof behind Frau Rall’s claims, although a male retainer and an examining doctor supported her conclusions. Officials in the Native Commission took Sindemaaß into custody, only to release her subsequently for lack of evidence.50 Sindemaaß’s story reveals the ease with which suspicion could fall on African domestics when German family members fell ill, and also underscores the tension between police and other officials, employers, and workers in matters of African women’s criminality and work discipline. Sindemaaß’s unruly behavior ultimately prompted the Ralls’ allegations of poisoning. However German newspaper portrayals of the story serve as a clear indictment of the colonial disciplinary system. In the resulting cautionary tale, the police’s so-called mild corporal punishments failed to quell an African maid’s rebelliousness, and her allegedly false accusations against her employers’ abuses represented her cagey attempt to manipulate the employment regulations for her own benefit. Her escalating misbehavior, culminating in an unpunished attempted murder, ultimately represented her success in subvert-

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ing the German system of law and criminal justice. The pattern of the Sindemaaß case fits the other poisoning rumors as well: insubordinate African servants and other laborers could exploit loopholes in local corporal punishment laws and secretly threaten their employers’ lives, while German officials and police stood by uselessly and failed to protect white settler families. African poisoning plots would go undetected and the murderers would escape justice because rational German legal principles and science were inadequate defenses against African servants’ secret knowledge of natural toxins. German officials were hard pressed to stem these poisoning rumors, but made every effort to dismiss the newspapers’ accounts of the Sindemaaß case as an unsubstantiated rumor. Her employer, Fritz Rall, worked as a government secretary in Gammams, the location of a scientific research institute where German officials had tested Ohlsen’s and Cramer’s alleged poisons on animals. Rall thus was likely privy to these tests and this may have made him more susceptible to suspicions of poisonings. Indeed, in an interview with his superiors Rall revealed that his misgivings “about an attempted poisoning attempt by the native maid finally came to him two full days” after his child’s sudden illness Windhoek officials admonished their underling Rall’s decision to speak out to the newspapers prior to the official investigation. Administrators in Windhoek also wrote to the paper in question, the Southwest Herald, to request “for political reasons that in the future such news should not be made public before official investigation has explained the matter.” An archival copy of a previous draft of the letter contained more telling remarks, deleted from the final draft, “Recently, there have been frequent reports in the newspapers of attempted poisonings of whites by natives, without verification of this conclusion for any incidents to date. The latest case of ‘Rall’ in which medical investigation had found that the sudden illness of the child was in all likelihood the result of [teething,] has a comical aspect and so in our opinion, is not to be blamed on natives.” Speculation about poisoning persisted in the press despite German officials’ efforts to calm settlers.51

Poisoning Rumors Persist in the German Press The persistent poisoning rumors served to justify white settler men’s unsanctioned vigilantism against servants through paternalist claims to protect their families. During the continued newspaper exchange over rumored poisonings, a missive from Klein-Windhoek settler Edgar Lange urged German officials to change the rules on corporal discipline to better protect white women from physical assaults from their rowdy African maids. Whereas in the American South and in South Africa “black peril” rape rumors used the language of chivalry to justify white men’s defense of white women from the alleged danger of black men’s sexual assaults, in South West Africa, Lange urged German officials in the colony to defend white

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women’s honor against brutal African maids, who were fully deserving of corporal discipline: It almost sounds unbelievable, when one hears the insolence with which the native wenches [weiber] address their mistresses; but it has gone so far that it defies description how these beings are allowed to attack their white mistresses, to let loose on them with pots and sticks and bite white women in scuffles. . . If one sends these native females to the [Native] Commission, they are at worst locked up, since one should never hit such an innocent angel, which certainly a woman, or respectively a feminine being is. . . . Why does such an animal not receive her equal share of fifteen or twenty-five strokes like a man?52 As in the black rape scares in South Africa, settlers underscored the vulnerability of white women as proof of the need to repress African workers, but here Lang’s complaints also refuted African women’s femininity and denied their sexual appeal. Unlike black peril hysteria, these depictions of black women as animals ignored any possibility of sexual tensions in white households. The dynamic of the poisoning scare in South West Africa conforms closely to the colonial rape rumors in both the unsubstantiated nature of the charges, as well as the tense social climate that fostered them, particularly growing interracial conflict, gender anxiety, and other insecurities among white colonists.53 Furthermore, and, perhaps most importantly, just as these so-called black peril scares erupted in organized settler vigilantism and repression against indigenous men in other settings, German colonists seized on poisoning rumors to assert the need for German officials’ harsher treatment of recalcitrant laborers, as well as German settler men’s alleged patriarchal right to discipline African maids with deadly violence. The newspaper Southwest editorialized in connection with the Cramer case: “For as long as the colony has been German, to our knowledge, there has not yet been a confirmed case where a native has poisoned a white. If that is really what took place in Otjisosorindi, then it would be time for sharper measures to be taken, and without hesitation.” However, the paper advocated protectorate forces’ intervention rather than supporting settlers’ vigilantism, and cautioned residents against paranoia.54

Conclusion The moral at the heart of the poisoning scare was that African women in the colony were dangerous and out of control, in part because of the official proscription against their corporal punishment, which German administrators argued was necessary to prevent miscarriages, as occurred in the Cramer case. However, white settlers seemed fully aware that German bureaucrats enforced the ban against physical discipline of African women erratically, and their protestations targeted even this

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nominal protection as a false case of chivalry toward animalistic African women at the expense of “feminine” white women. So the South West African poisoning scare departed strikingly from the black rape scares by identifying African women, not male servants, as the chief conspirators. By identifying female perpetrators, the poisoning rumors ultimately subverted or transposed many of the implied lessons of the black peril myths, especially the sexual vulnerability of white women to rape or seduction by black male servants. While the South West African poisoning scare emerged from comparable circumstances, it followed a different logic. The localized rumors of poisonings elicited very different patterns of violence in response, as Cramer in particular displayed. The German legal proscription against the physical discipline of African maids may have contributed to greater unresolved conflict in settlers’ homes, fueling their poisoning suspicions. The complex role of German officials in mediating relationships between African servants and white employers helps explain why the scare followed such an unusual dynamic in the territory, demonstrating “how rumors can be a source for local history that reveals the passionate contradictions and anxieties of specific places with specific histories.”55 In particular, the poisoning rumors displaced settlers’ fears of African maids’ sexual attractiveness and anger at their sexual and racial contamination of white men. Unlike rumors of the black peril in other colonies, the alleged poisonings did not rely solely on sexual metaphors for their power, and so they were widely discussed in print in a manner in which blatantly sexual matters might not have been. The very fluidity of poisoning as a symbol of danger thus lent it more flexibility than allegations of rape. As we have seen, German administrators and settlers were deeply divided over how to resolve the “dangers” of interracial marriages and biracial births, including white men’s unions with their African maids. In addition, many officials and settlers blamed African women in spreading venereal disease to white settlers. Poisoning served as a useful metaphor to express these white fears of racial pollution and contamination from African women, as well as the unacknowledged guilt and jealousy over white men’s sexual contacts with African women. Instead, white settlers’ paranoid assertions of poisoning translated the dangerous seductiveness, disruptiveness, and disease they perceived in African women into an imaginary toxin they claimed threatened the future of the white settler population. In the end, the lessons that white settlers increasingly drew from the poisoning rumors was that only lengthy experience with Africans and white paternal authority (i.e., the right of male settlers to punish their recalcitrant black laborers) could successfully contain the threat that African workers, especially maids, posed within their families. Given the sexual overtones associated with this specific danger, white male settlers’ punishment of maids and defense of their families might have led some, like Cramer, to cross into sexual violence. However, Cramer’s fetishized behaviors seem to have been based on his conviction that African women’s sexuality was innately poisonous.56

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Poisoning rumors did not subside easily, despite German authorities’ efforts to dispel them. The more German administrative efforts to limit corporal discipline for African women and encourage a restoration of the postwar African population by limiting African women’s work assignments, the more that white settler families objected that their own families’ needs were more important. Whites decried legal protections that kept African women and young children from servant work as well as from corporal punishment, yet, conversely, worried that sullen and resentful forced African servants in their households would exact secret revenge through poison. German administrators’ repeated attempts to end speculation over poisoning rumors brought further criticism for their coddling of African women. The next chapter explores volatile new accusations against African servants that emerged in February 1912 in the small town of Omaruru, which sparked further complaints against the colonial administration.

Notes 1. Quote from a letter to the editor signed as “This and that,” Dieser und jener, “Eingeborenenfrage,” Südwest 4, no. 29 (11 Apr. 1913). Parts of this chapter appear in my journal article, O’Donnell, “Poisonous Women.” 2. Bley, South-West Africa, 263; Kaulich, Die Geschichte, 134. See Oermann, Mission, Church and State, 183–85 on Missionary Wandres’ role as translator and expert witness in the Tissi case, where two white men defended their actions in the rape of a ten-year-old Damara girl by claiming she appeared to be over the age of consent. 3. C. “Frauenleben in Deutsch-Südwestafrika,” DKZ 11, no. 40 (6 Oct. 1898): 364. 4. Helene von Falkenhausen, Ansiedler-Schicksale. Elf Jahre in Deutsch-Südwestafrika 1893— 1904 (Berlin Dietrich Reimer, 1906), 19–26; Anonymous, Aus Südwestafrika, 31. 5. Eckenbrecher, Was Afrika mir gab und nahm, 49. The German colonial laws allowing the corporal discipline of indigenous workers date to 1896 in German South West Africa. They were derived from archaic German laws that permitted beating of servants in the homeland during the Wilhelmine Era, as outlined in Heinrich Schnee, Deutsche Kolonial Lexikon 3 vols. (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1920), s.v. Gerstmeyer, “Körperliche Züchtigung,” vol. 2, 366ff; “Prügelstrafe,” vol. 3, 111ff. 6. Clara Brockmann, “Deutsches Frauenleben in Südwest, II. Unsere eingeborenen Hilfskräfte,” KH 2, no. 15 (11 Apr. 1909): 2. Clara Brockmann, who was writing after the Herero War, had her wash done by a Herero woman prisoner whom she refers to as Albertine. 7. Cited in Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft, 177. 8. A short reckoning of several such highly publicized murder cases can be found in Martha Mamozai, “Der Fall Cramer—Ein Lehrstück in Sachen deutsches Recht und deutsche Sitte,” in Namibia. Kolonialismus und Widerstand. Materialien für Unterricht und Bildungsarbeit, ed. Henning Melber (Bonn: ISSA, 1981): 47–48. There were a few acquittals and maximum sentences of only a few years imprisonment (in Germany). 9. Bley, South-West Africa, 172–73; Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft, 176–77; William Beinart, “‘Jamani’: Cape Workers in South West Africa, 1904–1912,” in William Beinart and Colin Bundy, eds., Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa: Politics and Popular Movements in the Transkei and Eastern Cape, 1890–1930 (London: James Currey, 1987), 166–90. 10. His wife’s memoir, Ada Cramer, Weiß oder Schwarz. Lehr und Leidensjahre eines Farmers in Südwest im Lichte des Rassenhasses (Berlin: Deutscher Kolonial Verlag G. Meinecke, 1913) recounts a litany of difficulties encountered with state officials over state-provided workers.

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11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

“Zur Arbeiterfrage,” Südwest 5, no 58 (21 July, 1914) on prioritizing farmers’ labor needs over providing African workers as servants for officials or others. Quote from “Eingeborenenfragen,” Südwest 3, no. 72 (6 Sept. 1912). Johannes Gad, Die Betriebsverhältnisse der Farmen des mittleren Hererolandes (Hamburg: L. Friederichsen, 1915), 107–9, and tables 65, 66, 67. On state discussion of the Herero “Geburtenrückgang,” see the minutes of the Landesrat (Colonial council): “Aus den Sitzungen des Landesrats,” DSWAZ 12, no. 38 (11 May 1910). Gad, Betriebsverhältnisse, 108, table 67; Renee Pennington and Henry Harpending, The Structure of an African Pastoralist Community (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 17–28, describe the extended family economy of Namibian Herero descendants in Botswana in very similar terms, indicating that Herero prisoners of war maintained or later resumed labor practices as similar as possible to prewar life, despite losing their lands and cattle. Quote from Gad, Betriebsverhältnisse, 109. He goes on to note without explanation that young Herero women increasingly refused even to milk. “Die Preise beim Handel mit Eingeborenen,” Südwest 2, no. 82 (13 Oct. 1911). Gad, Betriebsverhältnisse, 109–16. “Eingeborenen-Sorgen in Deutsch-Südwest,” Südwest 4, no. 68 (26 Aug. 1913) details the standard ration of two pounds per day of rice or meal, meat once or twice per week, plus weekly portions of salt, sugar, coffee, tobacco, fat, and matches. “Lokales—13. Öffentliche Gemeinderatssitzung am Montag den 2. September 1912,” SZ, 1, no. 97 (7 Sept. 1912). Quote from “Ein Vortrag über den Arbeitermangel,” Südwest 2, no. 2 (6 Jan. 1911). Quote from “Zur Arbeiter-Beschaffung in Südwest, III,” DSWAZ 12, no. 97 (3 Dec. 1910). Quote from “Eingesandt,” SZ 1, no. 35 (3 Apr. 1912). Dieser und jener, the unidentified author of the text apparently identifies with the local housewives. Efforts to identify the author through the name of the farm were unsuccessful. Anonymous, “Frauenarbeit in Deutsch-Südwestafrika,” Süsserott’s Illustrierter Kolonialkalendar (1913): 164–72. Quote from Dieser und jener, “Eingeborenenfrage.” Emphasis in original. Quote from Gertrud von Hatten, “Die weiße Frau und das farbige Dienstpersonal,” KH 7, no. 11 (1913–14): 8. This finding matches the conclusion of Reagin, Sweeping the German Nation, 61–70. Reagin also explains the significance of ethnic stereotypes about lax housekeeping. Quote von Hatten, “Die weiße Frau.” Quote from Brockmann, Briefe, 109. Mamozai, “Der Fall Cramer,” 35, 47–48; Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft, 194–95, details the February 1912 case against Farmer Freiherr von Wangenheim for striking the pregnant Herero woman Elisabeth and bloodying her nose; the Outjo district officer related his already brutal reputation toward his African workers. “Prozess Wiehager,” DSWAZ 9, no. 15 (20 Feb.,1907); “Process Wiehager,” DSWAZ 9, no. 15 (23 Feb. 1907); “Process Wiehager,” DSWAZ 9, no. 40 (13 May. 1907); “Zur Sache Wiehager,” DSWAZ 9, no. 23 (20 Mar. 1907) 1–2; “Der Process Wiehager,” DSWAZ 9, no. 43 (29 May 1907). Quote from “Der Prozess Wiehager,” DSWAZ 9, no. 43 (29 May 1907). Hülsmann cited in Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft, 193. Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft, 192–93, 200–7. In December 1911, after Farmer Schneidewind set dogs on and beat the African woman Goras to death for not working, the Windhoek court sentenced him to only two years and two months imprisonment. “Verfügung des Gouverneurs,” DSWAZ 10, no. 7 (25 Jan. 1908) on lifting of prisoner-of-war status. Quoted from “Ohne Eingeborene auf der Farm!” Southwest 3, no. 30 (12 Apr. 1912) 2tes Blatt. N.A.N. ZBU 0697, F.V.i.2 Strafrechtspflege gegen Eingeborene. Begnadigungssachen. Specialia. Band I. Pardon applications from Gobabis on pages 111 and 148.

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33. DSWA, L.II.k.4, Bd 1, 35 reverse, quote from District Officer Weber, Gobabis District Office to the Governor’s office in Windhoek, 31 Aug. 1910. The letter also contains a request for a German maid from Baroness Tiesenhausen, whose husband is also mentioned as a poisoning victim in this chapter. 34. DSWA, L.II.k.2, Bd.3, 12-15. Distriktschef Runck, date obscured. Received 13 July 1912. Windhoek authorities rejected the request, 33, 2 Oct. 1912. Cramer, Weiß oder Schwarz, 90–96. South African government, Report on the Natives of South West Africa and Their Treatment by Germany (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1918), known as the Blue Book. 35. “Der Prozeß Kramer,” SZ 1, 97 (15 Aug. 1912). Appeal verdict, “Berufungsprozess Cramer, Südwest 4, no. 27 (4 Apr. 1913). 36. Quoted from “Der Prozeß Kramer,” DSWAZ 15, no. 66 (16 Aug. 1912). 37. O’Donnell, “Poisonous Women,” 31–54. “Der Prozess Kramer-Otjisororindi,” Südwest 3, nos. 66 and 67 (16 and 20 Aug. 1912). 38. “Der Prozess Kramer-Otjisororindi.” 39. “Der Prozess Kramer-Otjisororindi”; “Berufungsprozess Cramer,” Südwest 4, no. 29 (11 Apr. 1913); “Berufungsprozess Cramer,” Südwest 4, no. 32 (22 Apr. 1913). 40. Quote from Klotz, “Memoirs from a German Colony,” 169. 41. Michaelis quoted in “Berufungsprozess Cramer,” Südwest 4, no. 30 (15 Apr. 1913). Father Jacobs contended the term meant menstrual pains. In consultation, however, Michaelis, Jacobs, and a medical expert then agreed that, although the Herero might believe firmly that menstrual blood was poisonous, this was obviously not correct and need be pursued no further within the trial’s proceedings. 42. “Der Prozess Cramer vor dem Obergericht,” Südwest 3, no. 80 (4 Oct. 1912). Dr. Holländer testified, “In small amounts omugaigai is employed as a healing agent, and especially as an abortifacient, in larger it could well be poisonous.” 43. “Prozess Ohlsen,” Südwest 2, no. 100 (15 Dec. 1911); “Prozess Ohlsen,” Südwest 2, no. 101 (19 Dec. 1911). 44. Quoted from “Prozess Ohlsen,” Südwest 2, no. 101 (19 Dec. 1911). 45. “Prozess Ohlsen,” Südwest 2, no. 100 (15 Dec. 1911); and “Prozess Ohlsen,” Südwest 2, no. 101 (19 Dec. 1911). Farmer von Michaelis testified that Cramer first told his neighbors of his suspicion that the local Pfanne (pan) waterhole had been poisoned during the Ohlsen trial: “Berufungsprozess Cramer,” Südwest 4, no. 30 (15 Apr. 1913). 46. “Prozess Ohlsen,” Südwest 2, no. 102 (22 Dec. 1911), 2tes Blatt, I interpret her reference to “them” to suggest that she thought the natives plotted the deaths of all whites. 47. “Aus Gobabis,” SZ, 1, no. 25 (28 Feb. 1912); “Farmerverein Gobabis und der Fall Ohlsen,” Südwest 3, no. 15 (20 Feb. 1912), 2tes Blatt. 48. Quoted from N.A.N. ZBU 0697, F.V.i.2 Strafrechtspflege gegen Eingeborene. Begnadigungssachen. Specialia. Bd, I, 80 reverse. Graf von Schwerin, Distriktsamt Gobabis, 8 Feb. 1912. “Eine Vergiftungsgeschichte,” Südwest 2, no. 101 (19 Dec. 1911). On the waterhole advisories, see “Vergiftete Wasserstellen,” SZ 1, no 2 (6 Dec. 1911); and SZ 1, no. 59 (8 June 1912). 49. “Unter dem Verdacht des Giftmordes,” DSWAZ 15, nos. 93–121 (2 Nov. 1912). 50. “Unter dem Verdacht des Giftmordes”; “Der Giftmord in Windhoek,” Südwest 3, no. 89 (5 Nov. 1912). 51. Quoted from NAN, ZBU 0687, F.V.A.2 Strafverfahren und Strafvollstreckung gegen Eingeborene. Specialia. Bd. 1, 102, Windhoek, 9 Nov. 1912. Page 90, Gobabis, 25, Nov. 1912 mentions the bacteriological institute in Gamamms as the site of some of the tests. For example, poisoning speculation appeared in “Eingesandt,” Südwestbote (14 Sept. 1913), quoted in Mamozai, Schwarze Frau, 174. 52. Settler Edgar Lange, Klein Windhoek, “Unsere Eingeborenenweiber,” Südwestbote (29 Aug. 1913) and quoted in Mamozai, Schwarze Frau, 175.

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53. 54. 55. 56.

Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 67. Quote from “Eingeborenen-Behandlung,” Südwest 3, no. 80 (4 Oct. 1912). Quote from White, Speaking with Vampires, 83. Pamela Scully, “Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture: The Sexual Politics of Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South Africa,” American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (Apr. 1995): 335–59. Scully notes that the racial identities of the accuser and victim, marital status of the victim, and the level of violence involved were determinants in whether police prosecuted a sexual assault as a crime. Many white settler men considered black women, especially their employees, to be property (356).

  CHAPTER 5

A Moral Danger for the Children of White Mothers

The first black peril rape scare in South West Africa emerged in 1912, but before that, in neighboring British southern Africa, waves of accusations against African men for sexually assaulting white women occurred periodically from the late 1800s onward. In February 1912 German settler newspapers in South West Africa began to discuss rumors of an incident they referred to as the Omaruru case, in reference to the town where it took place. Settler Conrad Rust penned the following remarks about the incident, connecting the Omaruru case to other colonial rape scares in southern Africa, but his remarks indicated the specifics of the case revolved around the alleged assault of a child: While in the region of British Union of South Africa in 1910 there were 85 reported cases of native rapes of white women, in Southwest Africa until now only a single case has surfaced in which a black has so far forgotten himself as to sexually assault a child (Omaruru). . . . The proceedings across the border [in South Africa] should serve as a warning here. Yes, the employment of male natives as nursery maids should be prohibited. Also, the administration should make sure that children are not left alone for long periods of time in the sole care of natives. White females, however, who should think of consorting with natives should face severe penalties.1 Rust’s remarks highlight not only settlers’ awareness of the rape scares in other parts of southern Africa, but also how settlers’ discussion of the case resonated against African child-minders as well as the perceived misconduct of whites in the territory. As subsequent examination reveals, the rumors about the Omaruru case also shared a lot in common with the poisoning rumors discussed in the previous chapter, and that were prevalent among white settlers in South West Africa around this same time. While the poisoning rumors in centered suspicions on African

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maids, the Omaruru case suddenly directed whites’ suspicions against male Africans, especially young servant boys. The word “scares” is used to describe localized conspiracy theories that usually have little basis in fact. Scares are common in white colonial communities that stigmatize interracial sex, since they reflect “projection of forbidden desires” and justify “irrational impulses,” including unsanctioned violence.2 In South West Africa white settlers formulated a series of conflicting allegations surrounding the Omaruru case, suggesting that their reactions differed from similar rape accusations in British southern Africa and beyond. Research on colonial rape scares suggest they often emerge when white colonists are divided over how to enforce racial and sexual boundaries. In particular, colonial rape scares tended to promote white men’s interests against political authorities who restricted nonstate violence against subject populations. White men justified their calls for vigilantism against men of color accused of rape by claiming that colonial administrators and police were failing to keep white women safe. Conrad Rust and many other German settlers believed that the German colonial administration’s strict regulation of Africans had prevented other rapes in the territory and that, once colonial officials carried out the death penalty against the accused, it would deter any further African sexual assaults against white women. So Rust and other white settlers who expressed confidence in the colonial administration’s handling of the case deviated from the general pattern of other colonial rape scares. While the accusations behind the Omaruru case were never fully substantiated, and the specifics behind the case grew murkier over time, lack of evidence is not unusual in colonial rape scares. Accounts agree that initially Omaruru officials did not pursue capital charges, and many other white settlers later also raised objections to capital punishment for the accused. South West African newspapers captured the points of view of diverse white settlers, including Rust, who disputed how much blame to place on the accused, what legal penalties should follow, and what new measures could be taken to allay fears of future sexual molestations against white women and girls in the territory. As developed in the following section, these questions concerning guilt and justice became a source of moral contestation between different factions within the white settler community, and even resulted in death threats against one German pastor. Although Rust, and others, attacked his fellow whites for their weakening racial courage to demand the accused’s execution, he also revealed his anxiety that the case was a broader warning signal that white settlers’ immorality was beginning to endanger the safety and innocence of white children in South West Africa. So Rust mixed his demands for the colonial government to exact deadly violence against the perpetrator with his calls for white settlers to work together in their communities to enforce stricter sexual comportment among fellow whites and greater community oversight of white settler children’s welfare. Rust was not the only one to express such concerns. This chapter argues that the Omaruru case is a key indi-

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cator of white settlers’ coalescing racial solidarity against racial-mixing around the symbolic protection of white children’s welfare in South West Africa. Archival evidence shows that around this time German settlers demanded stricter segregation of white settler children from black and biracial children and servants, because they claimed that intimate contact with Africans endangered white minors both morally and sexually. Furthermore, middle-class whites also increasingly seized on the issue of white children’s welfare to discipline poor white men who engaged in racial mixing, as well as to rebuke white women for their unrestrained sexual behaviors, including prostitution. Newspaper coverage of the Omaruru case evolved over time, including rumors of other instances of child sexual molestation in South West Africa. As the evidence suggests, although many newspaper editorials cast the story as a rape scare, white public opinion gradually shifted in favor of clemency for the accused as part of a white morality campaign. Though the facts of the Omaruru case are not fully clear, the following narrative contextualizes the German colonial administration’s handling of the case, along with white settlers’ rumors about suspected dangers to white children. The chapter then considers the problem of children’s moral welfare in light of white settlers’ perception of high rates of venereal infections in the territory as a source of racial contamination from sex with Africans, their concerns over 1912 Reichstag debates against the colonial bans on racial intermarriages, as well as controversy over settlers’ campaigns to segregate the South West African public schools. The evidence suggests that middle-class whites came to regard the Omaruru Case not as the black peril, but rather a scare about a different type of racial pollution that they associated with Africans: venereal disease. In the wake of the case, collective settler criticism centered on shielding the territory’s white children from the consequences of poor whites’ immorality and sexual disease by demanding their segregation from African servants and biracial schoolmates.

Initial Reports of the Omaruru Case in the Press The earliest newspaper reports on the incident in Omaruru appeared in early February 1912, but were sketchy and full of errors. At first, the reports conformed to the typical pattern of colonial black rape scares that identify African men as the perpetrators in justifying white men’s vigilantism against them. The German South West African Newspaper at first alleged a black servant had molested a white girl, speculating that multiple contacts had occurred, which had led to her infection with an “evil” (sexually transmitted) disease. The author called on the white men of the town to carry out the swift, public lynching of the perpetrator: In the peaceful town of Omaruru a case has occurred that—thank God—in the history of white and black coexistence in [South West

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Africa] has never yet been heard of—an adult male servant has sexually abused a white girl of twelve years of age and infected her with an evil disease. The initial report transmitted to us does not state whether the bestial intercourse was discovered through discovery of the child’s illness and thus likely may have lasted for some time. Unfortunately, it appears so. . . . Has a cry of horror now gone up through Omaruru? Have the white inhabitants whose racial sensibilities have been struck in their most sensitive place set out to force the black beast to pay for his misdeed [by hanging him] on the nearest camel-thorn tree, for this unprecedented, most insolent mockery of the honor of the white name?! Nothing of the kind has occurred.3 In the report, the German South West African Newspaper deliberately provoked white readers’ moral outrage through hints that sexual relations between the two parties may have been ongoing, implying the white girl in question may have been a willing sexual partner to an African man. The author demanded an immediate lynching of the accused black servant as the only means to restore white racial honor and forestall further African men’s assaults on white women. The initial story followed a script that was typical of other colonial rape scares, which, like the previously discussed South West African poisoning scare, offered a pretext for a divided white community to cohere around a specific source of danger and neutralize it through violence. However, in reporting on the Omaruru case, local newspapers instead demonstrated that settlers from different social strata disputed the underlying causes behind the assault. For example, Conrad Rust’s remarks placed the blame for the attack on the immorality among whites in the colony, though the editors of the German South West African Newspaper adamantly refuted Rust’s position: “Judgment of this case should revolve around the defilement of a white underage girl by an adult black man, and should not, in the first instance, speak in judgment about the damage to morality from similar events between whites and other whites or between white men and black hussies [Weiber].”4 Opinions not only disagreed over the underlying causes of the case, but also who was culpable and how to mete out justice. White settlers who blamed the case on African conspiracies wanted lynching to expiate the danger, but this did not satisfy those who regarded white men’s sexual mixing with Africans as the primary source of the settler community’s moral and bodily contaminations. The factual basis for the charges in the Omaruru case were shadowy at best, though newspaper accounts agreed that a German doctor had diagnosed a white girl with gonorrhea. The ensuing accusations of sexual assault simply may have arisen from contemporary white settlers’ prejudices that such diseases were endemic among Africans in general and that African men particularly desired white women, leading to their unproven conclusion that the African servant youth was the likeliest source of the unnamed girl’s infection.5 The Southwest alleged graph-

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ically how the girl’s infection occurred, though it did not offer a source: “It was apparently not actual sexual intercourse [Immissio penis], but rather a game in which his finger tore her hymen and the transmission of gonococcus took place. The completion of the sex act probably was only forestalled because the Bambuse [derogatory] suddenly happened to be called away by his employer.”6 The scenario was unlikely, but it explained why there was no physical evidence of intercourse. Despite the newspaper’s assertion that the encounter was only a game between the two, the editor insisted that the African boy had intended to assault the girl and therefore merited a death sentence. A series of other speculative newspaper accounts, letters to the editor, and editorials appeared between February and July 1912, describing the events in Omaruru along conflicting lines. As more details came to light, German newspaper identified the alleged culprit as a Herero servant lad called Friedrich in the employ of the Omaruru district officer, Hugo Görgens. As noted in the discussion of the poisoning scare, German settlers were often critical of colonial officials who employed Africans as servants who could be put to productive work on their farms. The shortage of adult workers was in large part due to the Germans’ genocidal treatment of the African population. Rumors that targeted the official as the African servant’s employer seem calculated to cast blame on the colonial administration. More strikingly, though early accounts described Frederick as an adult, later accounts estimated Friedrich’s age at between fourteen and sixteen years. Perhaps most importantly, newspapers corrected that the unnamed female victim was not twelve years old, as first reported. Instead, she was much younger, around five years old. Moreover, although the case against Friedrich was circumstantial, published accounts reasoned that his sexual assault did not take place in the girl’s home, although a common script in other colonial rape scares led to suspicion on male servants employed in white homes. Where did the alleged assault occur in the Omaruru case? No clear answer emerges. Some sources speculated it took place either in a courtyard of the magistrate’s office, “more or less under the eyes of the police” but others claimed the molestation occurred on a distant property, cut off from the rest of the town by seasonal flooding. Follow-up reports offered another key revelation: the girl’s mother had recently died, and the girl’s father had given her over to state guardianship before he left in the district.7 In sum, this new information seemingly shifted many whites’ perceptions of the alleged crime and the proper course of justice. Although blame against the colonial officials in Omaruru quickly mounted, the neglectful absence of the child’s paternal protector deflated public calls for a chivalric defense of the girl’s honor through vigilantism.

The Omaruru Case as an Object Lesson for White Parents The revelations to newspaper readers of the youthful ages of the individuals involved led several readers to write letters in reaction, questioning whether either

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the unnamed girl or Friedrich were sexually or emotionally mature adults or only children, without moral culpability for their acts. While still under the impression that the female victim was an adolescent, the editors of the German South West African Newspaper had overtly condemned her, stating that she would have to leave the territory because she could no longer be permitted in the company of other white classmates. The editors quickly recanted after learning she was much younger.8 Perhaps the realization that Friedrich was only a teenager also may have reduced white settlers’ credulousness that the event could be part of a wider rape conspiracy among Africans. Once the media generally agreed that the boy was acting on his own and the youthfulness of the female victim made her blameless, other editorials disagreed over who should be held accountable for her alleged molestation—Friedrich, or someone else, perhaps the remiss German district official who employed him or the victim’s state-appointed guardian. Some newspaper commentaries interpreted the Omaruru case not as a larger conspiracy or an intentional assault at all, but rather as an interracial friendship between youngsters that had gone awry: “In reality, white and black children growing up too intimately together is extremely questionable, and we do not understand the all-too-often observed carelessness of many of the [white] families living here on this point.”9 The author took the incident as evidence that other white settler parents and guardians must be more vigilant of their children. Further editorials and letters to the editor soon added their voices to the accusation that poor white settlers’ parental neglect was true cause of the Omaruru case, and identified lax guardianship as a widespread problem in South West Africa. A strong opinion began to coalesce that the white settler community had an overarching responsibility for preventing such incidents, even among children in state custody. Some wrote to demand greater parish council oversight of local orphanages but also deplored the many lax white working parents in the colony, who permissively allowed their children too much unsupervised contact with African retainers or playmates.10 Middle-class spokespersons seemed to be the most likely to call for greater welfare protections for white children in the wake of the Omaruru case, and one author even editorialized that the case was reminiscent of the carelessness of working-class parents in Germany, who also failed to chaperone their youngsters. In particular, the author expressed concern that poor, white homesteaders living alongside large African populations would have even more difficulty safeguarding young white children than white families with only a small number of African servants, noting, “It is already not easy for white parents in Southwest Africa to arrange the communal living of their own children with the natives, namely the black houseboys, so that no sexual [sittlich] danger for the white children arises.”11 Remarks such as these reflect a growing popular consensus among middle-class white settlers that the Omaruru case demonstrated the need for white community organizations to assume greater responsibility for the welfare of all the territory’s

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white children, especially given their assumptions about the moral failings of poor white parents and the unrestrained sexuality of Africans.

Secrecy and Rumors The failure of local officials to notify the white residents of Omaruru became another reason to demand greater community oversight. Letters from townspeople claimed that none of the elected representatives of the parish council were allowed to attend the accused’s judicial hearing. One alleged that District Officer Görgens and two of his assistants had conducted their investigation of the case with extreme secrecy while the white townspeople of Omaruru were dealing with heavy seasonal flooding. However, the author admitted that many locals also did not find the initial rumors of the incident credible, dismissing them as African stories. Lack of official announcements about the case seemed to feed many of the unsubstantiated rumors that followed; after town residents realized the case was in earnest, however, they learned that district administrators already had distanced the accused to an undisclosed location. Some commentators in the newspapers complained that the lack of public information about the incident was a signal that they could not trust the colonial government to protect their families, though an elected member of the parish council subsequently defended the local officials and claimed all required procedures had been followed. Collectively, however, the civilian members of the parish council rejected the Native Commission’s proposed sentence of eight years’ incarceration in the case as too mild a punishment, and appealed to the central colonial administration in Windhoek to review the case and impose a death sentence.12 In further evidence of white settlers’ distrust of the colonial administration, new rumors of danger followed on the wake of the Omaruru incident. Unconfirmed allegations surfaced in the press, including charges that other perpetrators may have been involved and that similar incidences of African men’s molestation of white children had already occurred. These reports served to whip up white settler men’s anxieties for their families in the face of government secrecy. The newspaper Southwest was perhaps most vocal in demanding harsher state sanctions or else threatening vigilante reprisals against African men in response to the case: Unfortunately, the incident in Omaruru is not even isolated there. As we have discovered, there have also been two similar cases which occurred in Windhoek district, one of them in Windhoek itself, and the other on a farm. And, therefore, it is high time for once to take tough measures against such bestial fellows so that this most dangerous of all epidemics does not spread more and more and threaten our women, girls, and children every day. Who among the farmers will dare to leave

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his female dependents alone without white male protection, without ruthless intervention here?13 Such newspaper editorials inflamed white readers’ fears of further racially motivated sexual assaults and criticized the German colonial administration’s failure to protect white settler families. In the weeks that followed, a steady stream of editorials maintained pressure on the governor to review the case and impose the death penalty against Friedrich. A few continued to exhort readers to lynch Friedrich, if Governor Theodor Seitz failed to order his execution. Their demands repeatedly connected the case to an awareness of extralegal violence in other regions: “If not, then here too the lawless state of self-help should be adopted, as in the Southern United States or in British South Africa! Southwest Africans, stand up like a man for your women and girls!”14 As the previous narrative has outlined, German soldiers had justified their violence in the Herero and Nama Wars as chivalric defense of white settler women. In the postwar era, white settler men defended their deadly violence against Africans as exertions of patriarchal authority and acts of chivalry, including in the Wiehager and Cramer murder trials. White settler men’s efforts to invoke male honor and chivalry in the wake of the Omaruru case might have heightened as a result of their perception that colonial officials had infringed on male settlers’ rights in handling the case without allowing greater public input.

The Question of Capital Punishment In the 1930s, when Nazi Germany examined the pervasive lynching in the United States, they perceived an overarching biological danger to whites from blacks, yet deplored the lawlessness of mob violence. Their misgivings about vigilantism flew in the face of their own movement’s orchestrated pogroms and other community-centered attacks on Jews. Nazis revealed a disturbing fascination with images of lynching. In 1912, by contrast, the German press offered little coverage of the Omaruru case. The Lüderitzbucht Newspaper mentioned only one editorial about the case in an unnamed publication in Berlin, which sided against lynching Friedrich. The anonymous author, S., shamed settlers who took pleasure in casual and sadistic mob violence, especially when so many white men in the German colonies who claimed to be the bearers of culture were themselves guilty of numerous sexual assaults against African women. S. noted that due to the “uneducated, and much lower cultural level of the negro boy” in the Omaruru case, he had no exposure to German morals. The author compared the case sympathetically to a recent news story of a depraved working-class German boy who assaulted the girl next door. The author’s remarks demonstrate the stark divergence between prewar racism and Nazi racism. German racism before World War I regarded Africans as culturally

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inferior, but did not generally cite Africans as a sexual and biological threat to Germans.15 In South West Africa, in contrast to Germany, media pressure demanded capital punishment as necessary to white racial honor and white women’s safety. After Governor Theodor Seitz reviewed the case in May 1912, he sentenced Friedrich to death for a sexual assault against a white female. German religious leaders and other middle-class whites strongly objected to the governor’s imposition of the death sentence, also pointing to white settlers’ own flagrant moral failings. In particular, Swakopmund Pastor Hans Hasenkamp, a prominent supporter of the Women’s League and a strong opponent of racial mixing, publicly decried the calls for Friedrich’s capital sentence and appealed for clemency. In a lengthy address, Hasenkamp chastised an anonymous editorial-writer who had threatened him with an unmarked grave in the desert if he persisted in his blaming whites for the Omaruru case. Yet, instead of recanting his defense of Friedrich, Hasenkamp steadfastly asserted that white settlers’ own sexual misconduct was the primary impetus for what took place in Omaruru.16 Hasenkamp catered directly to the middle-class white settlers who continued to regard the Omaruru case as a sign of the need for greater protection of white children and more circumspection among white settlers. He and other German clerics claimed to speak for the majority of “upstanding” settlers in seeking clemency for Friedrich. Hasenkamp cited the Omaruru case as hard evidence that white children’s morality was suffering in South West Africa from the sinful behavior of many poor whites in the territory, and he rebuked white women for their promiscuity and white men for their sexual relations with African women. He declared that the community could not discuss such moral transgressions in public because they were too shocking for young ears: “The upstanding men and women of the colony—who make up the majority—unreservedly agree with us [pastors and missionaries]. For moral and national reasons, whenever there is opportunity both within and outside our clerical work, we fight the sin and shame of German men who consort with African women. Unfortunately, we cannot address this lamentable situation directly in our sermons, because the presence of children forces us to greater circumspection.”17 Hasenkamp alleged that immorality among white settlers had created the debauched climate of the colony that had spawned the events of the Omaruru case, and therefore whites’ own culpability in corrupting the youth should prompt them to greater mercy for the accused. Though unstated in his editorial, Hasenkamp, and an increasing number of other race-conscious middle-class settlers in the colony, believed that white men’s “sinful” contact with Africans was resulting in rampant venereal disease as well as mixed-race progeny, which threatened the colony’s biological future. Governor Seitz eventually did commute Friedrich’s sentence in early July in light of his youth, perhaps in response to the prelates’ campaign for clemency.18

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Both critics and supporters of the capital sentence openly compared it to the milder sentence determined in June 1912 in the previously mentioned case of the former two German police watchmen, Odenwald and his accomplice Lobbes, in the abduction, rape, and death from mistreatment of Tissi, the gravely ill, elevenyear-old African girl in Keetmanshoop. Since Odenwald faced only four-and-a-half years of imprisonment, African leaders complained to local missionaries that the starkly different verdicts in the two cases confirmed the racial bias of the colony’s judicial system. As German missionaries lobbied Seitz for clemency, they remarked on African leaders’ anger at Friedrich’s death sentence. Missionaries’ warnings of collective African unrest and organized resistance at this time also may have been pivotal in Seitz’s clemency decision. Despite a brief press announcement that German officials were interrogating a second servant in the case, the colonial administration does not appear to have filed any further charges. Instead, the print discussion of the case simply ebbed away in favor of fresher news.19

Rumors of Other Cases? German newspapers in South West Africa repeatedly spread rumors alleging additional incidents of child sexual infection had taken place in Windhoek, which colonial officials had not disclosed to the public. The reporters of the Southwest mentioned that at least one of these incidents turned out to be a false alarm without providing many details: “In connection with our first report of the Omaruru Case, we reported that there were two similar cases in the district of Windhoek. Happily, investigation of the first has revealed that there was a different source of illness for the girl. However, the second case, which took place earlier, occurred on a farm that was actually in the neighboring district of Rehoboth, but Windhoek district authorities apprehended the perpetrator. Unfortunately, the punishment in the case was much less satisfactory than [the capital sentence] in Omaruru.”20 Because these allegations were unsubstantiated, they would be easy to dismiss as efforts to widen readers’ alarm and press for public violence. However, some archival evidence confirms some of these details, according to a German official’s report on a case of corporal punishment on a Rehoboth farm. Windhoek archival documents of the German colonial government dated February 1912 shed a little more light on events that may have been the basis for the rumors of a second case of a white child’s venereal infection. In the wake of the media furor over the Omaruru case, District Officer Wilhelm von Vietsch of Rehoboth District reported to the governor’s office that several weeks earlier he had adjudicated an alleged sexual assault on a young white girl on a local farm. The case allegedly took place in January on the local farmstead, but Vietsch had kept the story quiet for several weeks. As Vietsch outlined, a white farmer residing in Rehoboth

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district, whose name is withheld here for privacy, had reported to a passing police patrol that a ten-year old “Hottentot [derogatory]” (Nama) lad named Auchub had molested his three-year old daughter. A doctor’s examination in Windhoek confirmed his allegation, identifying his daughter’s genital injuries. So, the district officer then took Auchub into custody and administered corporal discipline, then released him to a new work detail for a Rehoboth Baster farmer. Vietsch seemed to determine that his beating and removal of the boy to a new, biracial employer sufficient to prevent a recurrence; presumably he would have no further access to a white girl. He suggested the girl’s parents were careless in allowing the situation to arise, since African children were prone to such behavior, “a lack of supervision offered [the boy] the opportunity to commit a lewd act, such as is unfortunately commonplace between native children.”21 Vietsch likely believed that the affair was settled following Auchub’s removal from his employment with the white farmer. However, a follow-up medical examination of the farmer’s daughter revealed genital condyloma and “indolent swelling” [indolente Schalung] of the glands consistent with “secondary lues” [sekundäre Lues] —evidence for medical diagnoses of genital warts and secondary-stage syphilis. The doctor’s initial report had asserted that the girl’s hymen was intact, but concluded that the infection occurred during an “interrupted sexual assault [nicht ausführbaren geschlechtliche Mißbrauches].” Although a diagnostic test for gonorrhea was available in 1900 and for syphilis after 1906, laboratory tests were not mentioned in the report. Without this confirmation, doctors’ examinations would have been unreliable. Indeed, one might reasonably infer that those involved mistook the girl’s observed genital warts for wounds as evidence of an attempted sexual assault. So, firm medical basis for the charges of molestation also seems doubtful in the Rehoboth case, and the allegation that the infection also was due to another attempted but interrupted sexual assault also seems highly improbable.22 Regrettably, the ultimate outcome of the events in Rehoboth also is not clear from archival records. However, Vietsch notes that the farmer, after learning of his daughter’s syphilis infection, demanded that officials return the accused boy to his farm. The reason given for his request was because the lad’s father had threatened to leave the farmer’s employ to go reside with his son. Vietsch did not indicate whether or not he actually returned Auchub as requested, as perhaps the white farmer’s real motive in seeking the boy’s return was to lynch him. The file ends without resolving the story, and so raises more questions than it answers. On the one hand, the incident largely remained out of the press; on the other hand, colonial officials seemingly consulted the white father of the girl in the case. Nonetheless, the overlapping timing and parallels between the Omaruru and Rehoboth cases as well as allegations of a third possible venereal infection of a white girl seems to corroborate that some local physicians were conducting intrusive sexual exams on children. Why were Germans in South West Africa investigating young, white girls for possible infections with venereal disease around this time? Perhaps

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widespread perceptions of an increase in local venereal cases among whites made doctors expect to find signs of hereditary infections. But, then, why attribute these infections to African servants?

Was the Omaruru Case a Rape Scare? The Omaruru case (and the second alleged incident in Rehoboth) were unusual because they identified white girls rather than white women as victims of sexual assault, and African boys rather than African men as their attackers. Though these details might seem exceptional, other colonial communities sometimes identified white children as the victims in rape scares, and treated these cases much on a par with assaults on adult women. One recent study documents a wave of rape accusations alleging child victims in Kenya in 1920, including at least one allegation of an assault that resulted in a white girl’s venereal infection. The study concludes that colonial rape scares that identified victims as girls or elderly women resulted in less public discussion of whites’ sexual morality, presumably a topic that might prove too controversial.23 This analysis fits the dynamic of the poisoning scare discussed in the previous chapter, where poison seemed to operate as a metaphor to conceal German settlers’ reticence to discuss interracial sexual desire. However, the opposite outcome emerged in South West Africa, where the Omaruru case prompted middle-class whites to blame poor white settler men’s sexual contact with African women as the root danger to white children’s physical and moral welfare. The particular fixation on sexually diseased young white girls may have served to suggest whites’ growing anxiety that white settler men in sexual contact with African women were contracting venereal infections that would be passed on to the next generations, unless the white community united to ensure the colony’s white, eugenic future. White colonists in many other Asian and African territories also commonly expressed fears that servants and playmates of color could contaminate the morals of their white children. However, most historians interpret these expressions as whites’ anxieties that extensive contact with subject populations would subvert their children’s affections and their racial and national loyalties. These misgivings fit into a broad transnational context in Europe and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century in which instilling morality and national identity in young people were interconnected areas of private and state concern. However, when middle-class whites in colonial societies united to condemn interracial liaisons, they typically elevated white women as the guardians of the community’s morality and so depicted white mothers as positive moral influences on white children in contrast to subalterns’ racially degenerate moral influences on white children. In South West Africa white women seemingly did not figure as proper maternal guardians in the same way as in most other colonies.24

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Settlers also placed white women’s immorality under fire in their discussions of the Omaruru case, but especially the lapses of many working-class settler mothers. Middle-class white spokespersons claimed that these mothers often allowed their children greater physical intimacy with African friends and servants, which risked exposing their children to moral and sexual contamination. They now demanded greater community intervention in order to segregate the children of poor whites in whites-only institutions that restricted their contacts black and biracial servants and playmates. By 1912 the German colonial administration in South West Africa had started to impose greater restrictions on white settler men to ban interracial marriages but also their casual relationships with black and biracial women, thereby pitting state authority against patriarchal rights. But as the population of white children expanded rapidly in the territory, their welfare superseded the rights of their fathers. In early 1912 local newspapers documented a series of alarming accidents befalling unsupervised young white children, including a young white boy bitten by a snake in his bedroom and a three-year-old child who was struck by a train. Even more disturbingly, the press exposed criminal cases indicting white men as sexual predators of minors, including the Tissi trial.25

“Greater Protection for Our Youth!” Among these cases of sexual predation against children, in March 1912 the Windhoek courts convicted a German man of breaking and entering white women’s and girls’ bedrooms in the city, while wearing only undergarments. Nine women testified against him, as he had apparently been conducting these nighttime visits for two and a half years before his apprehension. Next, the courts found former German schoolmaster Vogelbruck guilty of sexually violating a former female pupil while he had been employed as head teacher in the Kub school. His lawyer claimed as mitigating factors his history of a nervous condition, which had led to his loss of office several years before, and witness statements that indicated the girl came from a social milieu with less-strict views of morality. Weeks later, newspapers followed an intense hunt to capture two ne’er-do-well German drifters, Falk and Sommer, who had brazenly murdered and robbed an officer delivering the police payroll. Their crime spree included abducting, raping, and slaying an eight-year-old Herero girl and her grandmother.26 The more such criminal cases undermined white men’s status as paternal protectors and identified them as sexual predators, the more hypocritical appeals to white chivalry appeared. The South West African press also underscored the necessity to shield young white children by highlighting the danger of their contact with African caregivers. Even before the Omaruru case, the previously discussed Elisabeth House maternity hospital for white mothers prevented African midwives from attending the

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Figure 5.1. “Deutscher Nachwuchs” (“German Procreation”). German Kindergarten in South West Africa. Undated. https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/kolonialesbildar chiv/content/titleinfo/11413324 Courtesy of the Colonial Picture Archive, Goethe University Frankfurt/Main Library: urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-891133.

births of white babies. In February 1912 the Women’s League inaugurated a new youth center, the Jugend-Heim (Youth Home) to educate and acculturate white children in Lüderitzbucht, complete with a subsidized kindergarten for the children of poor whites.27 The dedication speech for the new Youth Home in the city of Lüderitzbucht remarked that because many white settler housewives worked long hours, young white children in the community were too often left to their own devices or in the care of African servants. The Women’s League spokesperson made explicit reference to the Omaruru case as an object lesson for the city’s white parents, transposing the basis of the Omaruru rumors in the process, to one of molestation by an African caregiver rather than a playmate: Leaving children in the supervision of natives has proved in many cases to be a serious threat to body and soul of our little darlings. It is with the deepest indignation that we have just learned in the past few days of the brutal, raw manner in which a native in the north of the colony abused a small white child entrusted to his care . . . Also from a nationalist standpoint, the kindergarten here in the colony has a higher importance. With the frequent interactions of [white] children with

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natives, it is not uncommon that they learn the native language faster and more easily than their German mother tongue.28 The new, segregated youth center and kindergartens were designed to “relieve [white] mothers of their anxiety and sorrows” that resulted from depending on African caregivers. With the opening of these whites-only private institutions for children, Germans consciously sought to avert repetitions of the Omaruru case. Finally, a lurid headline for a different article demanded, “Greater Protection for Our Youth!” The article regretted that white parents could make more use of the segregated kindergartens, while also demanding that elected parish representatives in white communities exercise greater council oversight of orphaned white children.29 The German bureaucracy and local settler community of the colony long had worked to establish racially exclusive kindergartens for white children and ensure their moral welfare, which expanded with the population of working-class German women in the colony. The first private kindergarten opened in Windhoek in December 1902, a few years after the German Colonial Society began its female settlement efforts. The kindergarten symbolically as well as physically distanced the few white children of all social origins from their more numerous African and biracial counterparts. In favoring segregated institutions for settler children, Governor Leutwein had linked the need directly to the German Colonial Society program’s success in promoting the settlement of working-class and peasant women and families from Germany. Leutwein claimed white kindergartens were necessary to separate German children of working parents from undesirable companionship with African children, with their more open sexual attitudes, and instead to teach settler children from working families to share in bourgeois German family norms.30 Like the Elisabeth-House maternity hospital, the private kindergartens in South West Africa and the other German colonies were the result of cooperation with colonialist women’s organizations in Germany with overseas chapters. In particular, the Women’s League and Women’s Association for Nursing in the Colonies provided funding and the teachers. Indeed, as subsequent chapters detail, German women’s efforts behind these segregated colonial kindergartens for white children became even more pronounced after World War I, when the Women’s League resumed and expanded its support for German children’s institutions in Africa and steadfastly continued them into the Nazi era.31

White Children’s Position in the Colony A snapshot of the demographic trends in South West Africa around 1912 may help clarify the rapid expansion of institutional care for white settler children at the time of the Omaruru case. As previously noted, white population trends between 1907 and 1913 indicate a striking rise in the population of white children

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under fifteen years old in South West Africa. (Census figures appear in the appendix documenting their numbers expanded from 1,132 to 3,242, a 286 percent increase overall, with some districts reporting more than 300 percent.)32 Private educational institutions struggled to meet growing demand. For example, a white mother wrote in to the local paper to complain that the parish kindergarten in Swakopmund was dangerously overenrolled, and demanded the Women’s League send another trained nursery maid from Germany. Census figures for 1912 indicated that the roughly three thousand white children who lived in the colony now exceeded the population of biracial children (1,390, not inclusive of the Rehoboth Baster population). In a few districts, such as Outjo and Rehoboth, the number of biracial children still was comparable or exceeded white children, as table A.4 in the appendix demonstrates.33 Although many of the white children enumerated in the census were not yet of school age, the colony’s educational institutions had begun to expand to accommodate their growing numbers. In 1909 there were only twelve government schools in South West Africa offering free instruction for white children, with only 370 pupils enrolled. (Mission schools exclusively educated African students.) By law, however, white settlers’ children who lived within four kilometers of a government school had been obligated to attend full time between the ages of six and fourteen. However, starting in 1912, formal education became compulsory for all white settler children. Those who lived too far to commute daily now were minimally required to attend a boarding school between the ages of eight to twelve. Those from rural homesteads who enrolled in state schools therefore often resided in communal dormitories, some of which the Women’s League also managed. The league also mediated in the hiring of nursery maids, governesses, and tutors to care for white settler children, whose salary averaged more than 100 marks per month, too expensive for many white farmers.34 In Windhoek in 1912 the local school dormitory charged 600–700 marks per child per year, and the government offered a subsidized rate for poor families of up to 400 marks. Private organizations in Germany, including the Colonial Society and Pan German League, also assisted poor white settler families with these fees. By 1912 South West African newspapers reported that the colony had expanded its school system significantly: eighteen public schools had enrolled 548 children of colonists, of whom 436 were of German ethnicity—fifteen were elementary schools (Regierungsschule) and three were secondary schools (Realschule), with more under development. Many (24  percent) of the colony’s eligible schoolchildren now resided in dormitories.35 Arguably, then, 1912 was a watershed year for the German schools in the colony, as German communities across the territory dedicated several new schools and dormitories. However, as discussed below, German fathers could apply for legal recognition of their intermarriages, which normally would include the right to enroll their biracial children in these state schools.

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Schools and White Settlers’ Opposition to Racial Mixing In 1906, in the face of mounting white disapproval against recognition of biracial families after the outbreak of the Herero and Nama Wars, Windhoek’s Lutheran parish kindergarten had expelled all biracial children from its private kindergarten, and the school board governing the city’s public schools did as well. White settler reactions to the segregation were complex. Some approved of the expulsion, despite the hardship for biracial children: “One must agree with the Windhoek Newspaper when they contend that the state cannot escape its obligation to see to the instruction of children from recognized marriages of whites with half-white women. Even so, however, one must also concur that this biased attitude of the white population advances their racial interests.”36 The legal rights of the German fathers to public education for their biracial children remained a key sticking-point in settlers’ arguments for segregating the public schools. As this book’s introduction notes, from the early 1890s the German colonial governors ordered local district officers in South West Africa to deny applications for marriage registrations for church or civil unions between white settler men and black and biracial women. These refusals contradicted German and international conventions governing German marriages, and the colonial administration in Berlin ordered Governor Leutwein to resume registering civil and clerical intermarriages, in accord with the German Civil code of 1900. During the Herero and Nama Wars, in October 1905 Governor Frederick von Lindequist again ordered a ban on mixed marriages and against registering civil unions, followed by a ban on recognition of church marriages in October 1906, as well. Colonial Secretary Bernhard Dernburg did not challenge the ban. Despite the ban, a few intermarriages still occurred, including a number of weddings conducted in neighboring colonies, especially the British-controlled harbor in Walvis Bay abutting the German city of Swakopmund.37 After 1907, however, the superior court in Windhoek ruled all existing intermarriages as invalid. In addition, the self-governing charter of 1909 for South West Africa included paragraph 17f, which denied German men who were married or cohabitating with a non-white woman all active or passive civic rights, including the franchise after elections for local and territorial representatives began in 1910. As discussed in the foundation of the Homeland House in Keetmanshoop, German officials there and in other areas with high numbers of biracial births were empowered to demand the separation of cohabitating interracial couples as a public nuisance. In June 1912 amendments to the self-governance charter ordered district officers not only to separate unmarried mixed-race households, but also to remove African maids with biracial children from their employers if he was their father, as well as to maintain a separate official registry to record mixed-race births; this registry recorded the maternal information but did not identify their paternity. Collectively, these legal impediments simplified segregation of biracial children from the

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schools. However, in March 1912 the Territorial council won an amendment to the territorial charter to permit about 25 unenfranchised German men who married black and biracial women before 1905 to apply for restoration of their civic rights from their parish councils (though colonial governors Schuckmann and Seitz had also granted certifications as exceptions before 1912).38 The fact that the marriage bans were unenforceable in Germany also complicated matters. When Colonial Secretary Solf sought Reichstag confirmation of the marriage bans for South West Africa, as well as in East Africa and German Samoa, the ruling majority, including the Social Democrats and their liberal coalition partners, rejected his proposal and demanded its opposite. In May 1912 the Reichstag voted for the German Reich to establish uniform legal provisions for racial intermarriages within Germany and its overseas colonies, which the federal council (Bundesrat) quashed. Some historians argue that the discussions in the Reichstag were important for articulating a radical nationalist position of German racial identity as white, as well as a rejection of mixed-race Germans. Others also regard it as the successful defense of the SPD and Center against state biopolitical interference in the German family. However, influences from these debates did resonate in the 1913 amendments to the German citizenship law, which awarded German citizenship through blood descent. Still, most scholars do not find direct legal continuities between the German colonial interracial marriage bans and the 1935 National Socialist Nuremburg Laws, which defined German citizenship according to degrees of racial descent.39 Proponents of the colonial marriage bans fixated on the danger of mixed-race children inheriting German citizenship, and especially objected to their attending German schools with white children. German colonial theorist Paul Rohrbach’s essay reacting against the Reichstag vote, “Against Mixed Marriages,” appeared in newspapers in South West Africa, remarking that among natives, “the most common and filthy sexual things are their favorite topic of conversation and what happens in front of the children’s eyes corresponds to what is said . . . so recognizing the marriages between whites and natives, legitimating them so to speak, where possible even bringing them into school comradery with pure German children? Unbelievable!”40 Whites in South West Africa vehemently opposed the Reichstag majority calling for recognition of interracial marriages, and they also increasingly exerted pressure in favor of fully segregating state-run schools in the colony. Though some resident biracial families held legal certification as whites, which entitled their children to state-funded education, other white settlers increasingly objected to their presence in the classroom. The schools-segregation question also fit within a more extensive ongoing debate among whites in South West Africa over how to raise biracial children whose white fathers did not acknowledge them. After considerable public discussion, Governor Seitz had decreed in July 1911—in a position he claimed was shared unanimously by the Territorial Council and the general settler population—that it was better to raise “Mischlinge with the natives,

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rather than to give them a special position.” Seitz’s policy declaration ran counter to existing missionary efforts in the colony, specifically the work of missionary orphanages in Klein-Windhoek, Okahandja, and Keetmanshoop for unwanted biracial children that for years had educated biracial children in the German language and trained them in skilled handwork. In 1911 Seitz and the Territorial Council agreed that the colonial authorities would provide no further funding for these orphanages, thus relegating mixed-race children to a future with little or no German language instruction or formal education. The decision counteracted a previous proposal calling for efforts to discourage interracial couples by forcibly removing biracial children from their mothers’ custody to these orphanages and requiring the responsible German fathers to pay support for their extramarital children who resided there.41 Seitz’s policies diverged from the treatment of biracial children in most European colonies. The Dutch and French empires, for example, both favored naturalization for biracial children who succeeded in proving Dutch (or, respectively, French) paternity to the colonial courts and demonstrating Dutch (or French) linguistic and cultural competence to the satisfaction of colonial authorities. Seitz deliberately placed illegitimate biracial children at the status of other Africans in the colony by reducing their exposure to German language and culture, which might offer them the potential for recognition as whites.42 The much smaller number of German fathers with legitimate biracial children still could enroll them in public schools, but in the wake of the Omaruru case, as well as the Reichstag hearings against the colonial interracial marriage bans, white settlers campaigned strenuously against their admission.

Renewed German Calls for School Segregation In May 1912, just as Pastor Hans Hasenkamp’s editorial about the Omaruru case indicted the moral conduct of whites in South West Africa and urged greater attention to white children’s welfare, an anonymous complaint appeared in the newspaper about the schools that bore echoes from the Omaruru incident. The author was a self-identified “old Afrikaner”—a longtime white male settler who praised the German administration for enforcing sharper racial separation within settler society, rather than granting preferential treatment for “those natives who used to be considered as whites.” He offered the government schools as his prime example of the need for still greater segregation in the colony overall: “A wealthy Boer wanted to bring his children, among them a thirteen-year-old girl, to a newly opened government school. Once he saw the school, in particular the schoolchildren who were already there, he suddenly decided against the plan. When questioned for his reasons, he replied, ‘I won’t take my daughter among all these Bastard boys.’—This simple peasant saw the damage immediately, while many of us Germans pass by

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without noticing. Also, in other schools one finds Mischling children setting next to and between whites, which is not exactly an advantage for our growing youths.”43 In his final remarks, the longtime white settler man rebuked the lack of racial consciousness in Germany, as exemplified by the Reichstag vote to overturn the colonial marriage ban, further demonstrating the influence of this far-off decision on local events. His reference to the superior racial awareness among Afrikaners, an ethnic group that German settlers frequently slighted for their historical intermarriages with African women, would have been especially painful to many Germans settlers’ pride. The vague outlines of this story suggest it was invented, yet it no doubt succeeded in spurring new parental fears in the wake of the Omaruru case. Subsequent reactions from readers in a colonial newspaper fretted that, if the schools were not restricted to whites only, Afrikaners would begin to look down on and ostracize the colony’s German children, reversing the current situation between the two ethnic groups. Clearly, the school controversy had become an evocative target for those German settlers who sought stricter separation between the races. An editorial from a newspaper in Windhoek deplored the alleged problem and urged official intervention: “If such a situation is common in the [schools in] the South of the colony and in other locales, it is time that the government’s oversight became sharper.”44 The school-segregation controversy was an effective means to consolidate white racial prestige in the German settler community; as white parents pressed for administrative intervention, they imposed barriers for biracial children’s future claims to legal equality and recognition. Newspapers repeated demands for segregation of the schools amid unsubstantiated accusations of biracial children’s enrollment. Eventually, an article from a settler newspaper was reprinted in the local Staatsburger News in Germany, repudiating the enrollment of biracial children alongside white classmates in South West Africa: “Perhaps you are unaware that this school is attended by several Mischling children, who receive government stipends as the children of pure white parents. It is very understandable that the mothers of white children now are exploring other instructional possibilities. .  .  .  One can imagine that the coeducation of Mischlinge with the whites in the school in question is a moral danger for the children of white mothers. I myself have often heard white women complain about it.”45 The article even claimed the child’s relatives had fought against the Germans in the Herero War. The unfavorable publicity drove the German Colonial Office in Berlin to request the governor’s office in Windhoek to investigate these charges. In response to administrative inquiries, the regional officer of Bethanien detailed on the situation at his district school, where he acknowledged a biracial boy had received a government-subsidized dormitory stipend, thought the officer denied that the child’s relatives had fought in the Herero War against the Germans, as his inquiries had revealed only unsubstantiated local gossip against the family that had blossomed into these widespread rumors.46

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His remarks were accompanied by a report from Lüderitzbucht district officer Böhmer, who further detailed that three other children in the district of Aus who were mixed race also received 500-mark stipends from the District Council to cover the cost of their room and board in the school dormitory. The municipal council had been unanimous in awarding the stipends. District officer Böhmer explained that the parents of one of the children in question, the Colemanns, “count here as whites [gelten hier als Weiße],” but both had “colored blood in their veins.” He described making scrupulous prearrangements before permitting the child’s residence in the school dormitory, including approval by the other white residents of Aus.47 Böhmer’s descriptions serve to demonstrate how legal exceptions that rested on the personal reputations of well-regarded members of the settler community, when viewed outside the intimate local setting, became the subject of great concern for white settlers in other areas and outraged readers in Germany as well. Local gossip and smears against biracial families now became damaging potential weapons against their children’s legal status, although the children in question apparently continued to attend their local schools. In a markedly different case, when a German parent tried to enroll his son, the local teacher demanded a decision from the Swakopmund district officer, who determined that the boy was non-white and therefore ineligible to attend classes. The official recommended the parents emigrate elsewhere or else return to Germany, where the boy could receive his legally entitled public school education denied him in South West Africa.48

Conclusions In addition to the controversy over race and school admission discussed in this chapter, there were other numerous legal and social conflicts in South West Africa such as court cases contesting the racial and legal identities of particular individuals. In such instances, biracial adults as well as children were ruled to be native rather than white. Historians note that German settlers and administrators had begun to work toward securing white racial uniformity as a marker of the prestige and power that justified white rule in South West Africa, but similar bans were unnecessary in Germany. Scholars who examine the motivation behind the marriage bans argue that their practical function in preserving white rule in the German colonies through citizenship policies was different from the Nuremburg citizenship laws of the Nazi era, which sought to protect Germans from the imagined racial contamination of Jewish Germans. Indeed, this argument is strengthened by the fact that a nearby British colony, South Rhodesia (contemporary Zimbabwe), also enacted very similar racial separation policies to South West Africa between 1912 and 1920. For example, Southern Rhodesian officials and police harassed and separated biracial couples, particularly poor white men in unmarried unions with African women, and they also punitively examined male offenders as well as

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female partners of color for sexual diseases. Around this time, officials there began compiling records documenting mixed-race births, and they made determinations to segregate children of dual heritage from white schools, deeming them potential sexual threats to white classmates.49 As this chapter has shown, however, in South West Africa white settlers’ disputes over school segregation were rooted in their extreme anxieties over racial pollution and eugenic dangers, which were similar but not identical to the imagery behind black peril scares in other colonies. As their discussion of biracial children moved between the colony and Germany, it seems to have been indicative of a growing shift in popular German thinking, which was coming to regard race as biological. After all, French laws that incorporated biological race in French citizenship the 1920s similarly drew from French colonial policies regarding métis (persons of French and indigenous heritage). At the very least the Wilhelmine press’s circulation of extremist images of racial defilement and sexual contamination in the German colonies in reaction to the 1912 Reichstag vote likely contributed to growing racial prejudice in Germany toward blacks, in which the image of the mixed-race child served as an especially provocative symbol to elicit Germans’ repugnance against the mixing of races.50 Under the guise of white children’s moral welfare, Germans in South West Africa increasingly demanded complete segregation in the school system as the standard for the territory. Ultimately, however, the only way to achieve stricter segregation in future was to employ the territory’s new birth registry for children of biracial parentage, permanently distinguishing these individuals from other white children in the colony. Settlers’ public denunciations of individual colonists as non-whites, colonial officials’ interventions and investigations into private families’ racial backgrounds, and the new record-keeping systems to track racial heritage across generations were just a few of the disturbing trends that emerged in South West Africa by 1912 that Nazis also later adopted in Germany. In South West Africa Germans’ discussions over school segregation persisted into the Weimar and Nazi eras, as later chapters reveal. In the short term, settlers’ growing outrage over the dangers of sexual contamination of white children by their classmates denied many individual biracial children their legal right to education. So the moral campaign to preserve children’s welfare found a specific and highly vulnerable target in the small numbers of biracial children in German schools, whose own welfare did not seem to matter. As one critic remarked, the moral and racial transgressions of the sinful German men who spawned illegitimate biracial children outside of marriage constituted a hereditary flaw that inevitably would degrade the conduct of his children in the classroom. Ultimately, school segregation allowed white settlers to punish biracial schoolchildren for the supposed sins of their fathers as well as the racial origins of their mothers.51 However, white settlers also instrumentalized their exaggerated moral concern over settler children’s welfare to crusade against the perceived misconduct

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of poor whites in general, as discussed in the next chapter, especially through condemnatory gossip and scandal about white settler women. Today, the Omaruru case has largely been forgotten. For a time, however, it mobilized German settlers in a moral panic about white children’s welfare, a campaign that did not fully replicate the familiar rape conspiracy scares in other colonies, but instead spoke to local issues and concerns about venereal disease, biological contamination, and moral pollution. The peculiar trajectory of this obscure racial scare not only reflected the German settler community’s increasing censure toward white settler men’s liaisons with Africans, but also a concerted appeal to a unified vision of permanent white rule in South West Africa rooted through successive generations of racially pure settler children. Finally, detailed examination of the schools-segregation controversy and the Omaruru scare in South West Africa has revealed how gossip and rumors could resonate within white colonial communities in unexpected ways, depending on local circumstances and beliefs. Settlers’ talk demonstrated how personal reputation might determine the social position, political sway, and legal rights especially for individuals and families of mixed racial heritage who identified as whites, how rumors of danger might suddenly and dramatically realign local relationships and attitudes, and how damaging personal gossip could rob individuals of their social and legal standing. White settlers’ anxieties gave rise to the rumors that fueled moral panics; gossip about individuals and families’ reputations determined who was white, who was moral, and so who could be educated as a German in the public schools. The next chapter offers a further examination of the power of gossip and rumors in South West Africa, specifically as they centered on the sponsored settler women subsidized through the Colonial Society and its Women’s League.

Notes 1. Quoted from colonial farmer and author C[onrad] Rust, “Die schwarze Gefahr,” Südwestbote 9, no. 72 (16 June 1912). 2. Quoted from David Brion Davis, “Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature, “Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47, no. 2 (Sept. 1960): 217 and 224. On colonial rape scares, see especially Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 58–60. For South Africa, see Jeremy C. Martens, “Settler Homes, Manhood and ‘Houseboys’: An Analysis of Natal’s Rape Scare of 1886,” Journal of Southern African Studies 28, no. 2 (June 2002): 379–400, which finds that the Natal rape scare was a crucial factor in the promulgation of early laws providing for native African registration in Natal, and that the government’s legislative response was in large degree shaped by extralegal pressure applied by settlers. Other studies of rape scares in the region are Timothy Keegan, “Gender, Degeneration and Sexual Danger: Imagining Race and Class in South Africa, ca. 1912,” Journal of Southern African Studies 27, no. 3 (Sept. 2001): 459–77; Jonathan Pape, “Black and White: The ‘Perils of Sex’ in Colonial Zimbabwe,” Journal of Southern African Studies 16, no. 4 (Dec. 1990): 699–720; Joch McCulloch, Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902–1935 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

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3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

2000). South Africa was a key influence on German settlers’ racial thinking. For example, in April 1912 South African politicians’ impassioned parliamentary debates over how to resolve the danger of the black peril were reprinted in full in May 1912 in the LZ. Quote from “Ein ‘mene tekel’ [“a foreboding portent”],” DSWAZ 14, no. 10 (2 Feb. 1912), emphasis in original. Quote from “Ein ‘mene tekel.” Medical discourse in South Africa in the early twentieth century stereotyped native Africans as inherently diseased, thereby prompting public health efforts at greater racial segregation discouraging whites’ sexual contact with blacks. Jochelson, Colour of Disease, 17–33; Walther, Sex and Control, 55. Quote from “Zum Omaruruer Fall,” Südwest 3 no. 15 (20 Feb. 1912). Bambuse was a racial epithet comparing black, male servants to baboons. Quote from “Ein scheussliches Verbrechen,” Südwest 3, no. 10 (2 Feb. 1912), which depicts rumors and accusations against officials in Omaruru. “Aus Omaruru,” DSWAZ I4, no. 11 (6 Feb. 1912) depicts the scene of the crime as a distant property cut off by flooding. Colonial newspapers were operating under a new censorship law prohibiting public distribution of print matter “likely to incite natives to violence,” quote from “Das Pressegesetz in Südwestafrika,” Südwest 3, no. 11 (6 Feb. 1912). My journal article explores censorship in the local press, O’Donnell, “Public Danger of Rumor-Mongering.” “Ein ‘mene tekel.’” Subsequently retracted in “Zum Omaruruer Fall,” Südwest 3 no. 15 (20 Feb. 1912). Quote from “Ein ‘mene tekel.’” “Größer Schutz für unsere Minderjährigen!” SZ 1, no. 23 (21 Feb. 1912); “Zum Omaruruer Fall,“ Südwest 3 no. 15 (20 Feb. 1912). Quote from “Ein ‘mene tekel.’; “Zum Omaruruer Fall,” DSWAZ 14, no. 13 (13 Feb. 1912). “Aus Omaruru” DSWAZ 14, no. 11 (6 Feb. 1912); local white settlers’ reactions in “Zum Omaruruer Fall,” DSWAZ 14, no. 13 (13 Feb. 1912). A member of the local council contradicted the complaint, saying he had attended the hearing in “Zum Omaruruer Fall,” DSWAZ 14, no. 19 (5 Mar. 1912). “Ein scheussliches Verbrechen,” Südwest 3, no. 10 (2 Feb. 1912); letter from an anonymous townsperson “Zum Omaruruer Fall,” Südwest 3, no. 15 (20 Feb. 1912). “Ein scheussliches Verbrechen,” Südwest 3, no. 10 (2 Feb. 1912). Emphasis in original. Quote from “Ein scheussliches Verbrechen,” emphasis in original.” Both this article and “Zum Omaruruer Fall” Südwest 3 no. 15 (20 Feb. 1912) refer to two other cases in Windhoek, but the second article states that one of the other cases turned out to have been a different illness, presumably not a venereal infection. “Zum Omaruruer Fall,” Südwest 3, no. 57 (11 June. 1912) reports a second African servant in the same household was detained in the Omaruru case. S. Jonathan Wiesen, “American Lynching in the Nazi Imagination: Race and Extra-Legal Violence in 1930s Germany,” German History 36, no. 1 (Mar. 2018): 38–59; quoted from a German newspaper article reprinted in “Lynchjustiz,” LZ 4, no. 30 (18 May 1912). The author, S., describes himself as someone with long experience in South West Africa and other German colonies. Missionary Heyse compared the leniency of the Keetmanshoop verdict to point out whites’ hypocrisy in “Abermals zum Omaruruer Fall,” Südwest 3, no. 47 (11 June 1912); Pastor Hasenkamp, “Nachtrag zum Omaruruer Fall,” SZ 1, no. 44 (2 May 1912) took issue with whites’ immorality more generally. Quoted from Hasenkamp, “Nachtrag zum Omaruruer Fall.” Frank Becker, “Kolonialherrschaft, Rassentrennung und Mission in Deutsch-Südwestafrika,” in Politische Gewalt in der Moderne. Festschrift für Hans-Urich Thamer, ed. Frank Becker, Thomas Großbölting, Armin Owzar, and Rudolf Schlögl (Münster: Aschendorff, 2003), 162 on Hasenkamp’s 1913 publication in support of the bans on intermarriage states the connection to venereal disease; “Omaruru Verbrecher begnadigt,” Südwest 3, no. 53 (2 July 1912);

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19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32.

“Zum Omaruruer Fall,” Südwest 3, no. 54 (11 July 1912) on the second servant questioned in the case. See the previous chapter concerning the Odenwald case. “Aus dem Schutzgebiet” Südwest 3, no. 38 (10 May 1912) reports the review and death sentence; “Der Omaruruer Verbrecher begnadigt,” and “Andere Meinung,” SZ 1, no. 71 (6 July 1912) compare the two cases. Oermann, Mission, Church and State, 179–83, recounts from archival sources that the missionaries’ campaign included Missionaries Wandres and Olpp. German colonial secretary Dr. Wilhelm Solf was touring South West Africa in June 1912, raising the possibility of his intercession as well. Phillip Prein, “Guns and Top Hats” documents growing organized resistance among the colony’s African population in the period between late 1912 to 1913. “Zum Omaruruer Fall,” Südwest 3, no. 15 (20 Feb. 1912). Quote from NAN, ZBU 0687 F.V.A.2. betr. Strafverfahren und Strafvollstreckung gegen Eingeborene. Spezialia. Kaiserliches Bezirksamt Rehoboth, 10. Feb. 1912, 72. Quote from NAN, ZBU 0687 F.V.A.2. betr. Strafverfahren und Strafvollstreckung gegen Eingeborene. Spezialia. Kaiserliches Bezirksamt Rehoboth, Den ärztlichen Bericht des Herr Dr. Dobbelmann, 9. Feb. 1912, 74. Lutz Sauerteig, Krankheit, Sexualität, Gesellschaft. Geschlechtskrankheiten und Gesundheitspolitik in Deutschland im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, Franz Steiner, 1999), 70; Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003), 67. Amirah Inglis, The White Women’s Protection Ordinance: Sexual Anxiety and Politics in Papua (London: Sussex University Press, 1975), 124–29, 136–37; David M. Anderson, “Sexual Threat and Settler Society: ‘Black Perils’ in Kenya c. 1907–30,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 38, no. 1 (Mar. 2010): 47–74, esp. 49 and 66 about colonial accusations of African sexual assaults on white children. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 112–39, esp. 133. Hasenkamp, in “Nachtrag zum Omaruruer Fall,” remarks on the neglect of white mothers who leave their children in the care of “more sinful” [sinnlicher] and “precocious” [früher reift] African boys, and that when the state permitted white, female prostitution, it demeaned the status of white women although it protected white men hygienically. The growing metropolitan German concern over youths is the subject of Derek S. Linton, “Who Has the Youth, Has the Future”: The Campaign to Save Young Workers in Imperial Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), including the international scouting movements. Wildenthal, “Race, Gender and Citizenship,” 267–77, examines how efforts to prevent racial mixing impacted father’s rights in the German colonies, particularly during the spring 1912 Reichstag votes on racial intermarriage and conferral of legitimacy on mixed-race individuals. “Von einer Schlange gebissen,” DSWAZ 15, no. 19 (5 Mar. 1912) and “Der kleine überfahrene Junge,” Südwest 3 no. 24 (15 Mar. 1912). On the Tissi case sentencing, “Aus Keetmanshoop—Ein Sittlichkeitsverbrechen,” LZ 4, no. 19 (11 May 1912). “Aus dem Gerichtsaal,” Südwest 3, no. 25 (26 Mar. 1912). Kuno Budack, Raubmord 1912. Die ‘Falk- und Sommer-Morde’. Ein Beitrag zur Kriminalgeschichte von Deutsch-Südwestafrika (Windhoek: self-published, 1999). Wildenthal, German Women, 170; Boge-Smidt, “Germania,” 68–69. Quote from “Die Eröffnung des Lüderitzbuchter Jugendheims,” LZ 4, no. 8 (24 Feb. 1912), Reprint of the dedication speech by Herr Hauptmann a. D. Volkmann, Mitglied des Berliner Hauptausschusses des Frauenbundes der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft. “Größer Schutz für unsere Minderjährigen!” SZ 1, no. 23 (21 Feb. 1912). Leutwein, Elf Jahre, 235. On the foundation of schools, see also Hintrager, Südwestafrika, 43, which again connects the establishment of German educational facilities in South West Africa to sponsored women’s settlement. Wildenthal, German Women, 190–91. Population statistics available in Boge-Smidt, “Germania,” 432–33, tables 1c, 1d.

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33. Birth statistics also available in Boge-Smidt, “Germania,” 432–33, tables 1c, 1d; BAB, DKG, 195, 241, “Aerztlicher Bericht des Elisabeth-Hauses über das Jahr 1914”; “Eingesandt,” SZ 1, no. 45 (4 May 1912). 34. Daniel Walther, “Creating Germans Abroad: White Education in German South West Africa, 1894–1914,” German Studies Review 24, no. 2 (May 2001): 325–51; Cynthia Cohen, “‘The Natives Must First Become Good Workmen’: Formal Educational Provision in German South-West and East Africa Compared,” Journal of Southern African Studies 19, no. 1 (Mar. 1993): 115–34; and Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft, 244, which sets the number of African pupils (who attended mission schools) at 2,791 in 1913 and estimates that perhaps 15 percent of African youths in the Police Zone attended school. “Das Schulwesen in Deutsch-Südwestafrika,” SZ 1, no. 51 (21 May 1912); “Das Unterrichtswesen in den deutschen Schutzgebieten,” Südwestbote 2, 35 (2 May 1911); “Ein soziales Problem in Südwest,” Südwest 2, 95 (28 Nov. 1912). Consult O’Donnell, “The Colonial Woman Question,” 252-54 for data on contractual salaries of the league’s employees. 35. “Die Realschulfrage,” Südwest 2, no. 3 (10 Jan. 1911); Walther, “Creating Germans Abroad: White Education,” 333; “Das Schulwesen in Deutsch-Südwestafrika,” SZ 1, no. 51 (21 May 1912). 36. Quote from “Aus Windhuk,” DSWAZ 8, no. 6 (7 Feb. 1906). 37. Becker, “Kolonialherrschaft”; Essner, “Wo Rauch ist”; Wildenthal, German Women, 103–7. 38. Becker, “Kolonialherrschaft”; Essner, “Wo Rauch ist”; Wildenthal, German Women, 103–7; “Wichtige Verordnungen,” SZ 1, 58 (6 June 1912); F.IV.r.1, 105-107, Protokoll der geheime Sitzung des Landesrats am 18 Mai 1911. Governor Seitz opposed the loosening, Windhoek, 24 May, 1912 to State Colonial Secretary Solf, Berlin, RKA 5423, 224-25. 39. Matthew Fitzpatrick, “‘The Threat of ‘Woolly-Haired Grandchildren’: Race, the Colonial Family and German Nationalism,” The History of the Family 14, no. 4 (2009): 356–68, esp. 359. Wildenthal, German Women, 85; and Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten, 279, for example, do not see continuities between the race bans and the Nazi laws on race. Dieter Gosewinkel, Einbürgern und Ausschließen: Die Nationalisierung der Staatsangehörigkeit vom Deutschen Bund bis zur Bundesrepublik (Göttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 2001), 321–25 connects the 1912 debates to the German citizenship law of 1913, but not the Nazi racial state. However, Essner, “Wo Rauch ist,” 160, and Campt, Other Germans, 48–58, see continuities between Germans’ racist discussions of Mischlinge in 1912 and other influences that later informed Nazi ideology on racial-mixing, such as Eugen Fischer’s 1913 anthropological study describing the racial inferiority of the biracial Rehoboth Basters, and Weimar outrage against the biracial children fathered by French colonial soldiers occupying Germany in the early 1920s, known pejoratively as the Rhineland Bastards. 40. Paul Rohrbach essay reprint, “Gegen die Mischehen,” SZ 1, no. 64 (20 June 1912). 41. Becker, “Die ‘Bastardheime’”; Aitken, Exclusion and Inclusion, 121–24. Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft, 244, indicates that state funds also subsidized the mission schools’ instruction of German to native children; quote from RKA 5423, 179, Seitz, Windhoek, to Colonial Ministry, Berlin, 23 July 1911. Verordnung, 23 May 1912, Ausschnitt aus dem Amtsblatt für DSWA, copy in DSWA, F.IV.r1, Bd.1, 134. 42. Stoler, “Sexual Affronts,” showed white settlers were more successful in winning recognition and citizenship for their biracial children in the Dutch and French colonies. 43. Quote from “Eingesandt,” SZ 1, 50 (18 May 1912). 44. Quote from “Der Rassenmischmasch und seine Folgen,” Südwest 3, no. 63 (6 Aug. 1912). 45. Quote from “Mischlingswesen in Deutschsüdwestafrika,” Staatsbürger Zeitung 10, no. 14 (14 Sept. 1912). Clipping in DSWA, F.IV.r.2, Bd.2, 93. (The article is a reprint of “Rassenmischmasch und Seine Folgen.”) 46. DSWA F.IV.r.2., Bd. 2, 192, Officer Böhmer, Bethanien, to the imperial government in Windhoek, 21 Dec. 1912.

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47. DSWA F.IV.r.2., Bd. 2, 192, quoted from Officer Böhmer, Bethanien, to the imperial government in Windhoek, 21 Dec. 1912. 48. The denial is discussed in Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten, 271. 49. McCulloch, Black Peril, 168–77. 50. Emmanuel Saada, Empire’s Children: Race, Filiation and Citizenship in the French Colonies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Campt, Other Germans, 48–58. 51. “Der Rassenmischmasch und seine Folgen.”

  CHAPTER 6

African Stories

Scandal and social tension marked the years from 1910 to 1914 in South West Africa, as the white colonial community grappled with how to define the legal and social boundaries between the races. Scandal is a form of gossip about immoral behavior designed to lower the status of an individual within a community.1 As previous chapters have detailed, gossip was key in determining white settlers’ social status. The Women’s League’s sponsorship of German servants to South West Africa provided ample opportunities for colonists’ everyday gossip about white maids’ laziness and insolence, and, even more scandalously, their sexual promiscuity. The preceding chapters have examined how white settler men exerted their perceived patriarchal right to surveil and control white women, because the reputations of white wives and daughters reflected on their husbands’ and fathers’ honor. White settlers in South West Africa also voiced deep-rooted fears of white racial contamination by Africans, particularly through interracial sexual relations. So, as colonial scares about the dangers of Africans’ sexuality escalated among German settlers in South West Africa, so did the rumors about working-class white women’s social transgressions and immorality. In some of their letters home, German women remarked extensively on the vicious power of gossip within the white community in South West Africa. This chapter traces how gossip about white women fed general rumors about patterns of sponsored settler women’s sexual behaviors. Scandalous stories surrounding the sponsored maids undermined organized efforts to settle unmarried women in South West Africa. Assessing the reputations of these women and the harm from scandal to the Colonial Society and Women’s League also provides an opportunity to gauge the success of their women’s settlement schemes from 1898 through 1914. In particular, how did the gossip about these maids impact the stature of German women as the supporters, agents, and servants of the German colonial empire in its final years?

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Class, Respectability, and Reputation After 1910, even as the numbers of middle-class Germans increased in South West Africa, German colonial officials remained skeptical about bourgeois women’s suitability for the challenging local living conditions, particularly among homesteaders. For example, as district officials updated the advice manual for prospective settlers in 1911, Deutsch-Südwestafrika. Amtlicher Ratgeber für Auswanderer (German South West Africa: Official Guide for Emigrants), Windhoek District Officer Fromm offered a lengthy criticism detailing genteel German women’s inability to adapt as colonial workers, or wives: “Female persons who are pretentious in relation to their living circumstances as well as their social interactions should be warned against emigrating. Such persons are not suited as employees or as wives of the average farmer or city dweller. This type of woman suffers most under the loneliness and monotony of the life as soon as the appeal of its novelty has worn off.”2 As Fromm elaborated, such ladies did not understand their husbands’ financial situations, spent too much money, and quarreled with their spouses. He believed that these disgruntled wives inevitably returned to Germany rather than becoming long-term settlers. Fromm claimed that the divide that separated middleclass lifestyles back home and life on the colonial frontier was too great for “pretentious” women, despite South West Africa’s ongoing social and economic development. The official’s remarks culminated in a rebuke of the Women’s League for its misplaced desire to promote greater unmarried middle-class women’s settlement. He advised that the league make clearer “that for cultivated girls, positions as household assistants, companions and the like only exist in numbers so small as to be negligible.”3 Accordingly, he recommended that only women who were willing to perform their share of manual labor emigrate. Fromm restated the same principles that had guided the recruitment and assisted emigration of hundreds of working-class German maids since the program’s beginnings in 1898, first through the German Colonial Society and later the Women’s League. Nonetheless, a number of German colonialists, including the highest-ranking league officials, chafed at what they perceived as a misplaced emphasis toward working-class women’s colonization, arguing that specialized education could prepare genteel women for life in the colonies. The chair of the Women’s League from 1910 through 1920, Hedwig Heyl, who long had been involved in women’s home economics education, expressed sympathy for educated women seeking careers in the colonies. The league’s longstanding general secretary, Gertrud von Hatten, also lamented the reluctance of “cultured families” to “take in a member of their own class.”4 Heyl and Hatten strove to develop more positions for aspiring unmarried German middle-class settler women in South West Africa, and were eager for the league to shift its focus from subsidizing lower-class servants toward convincing prospective employers in the territory that “the accomplishments of a genteel woman prepared for the colony are incomparably more valuable than

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those of a simple maid.”5 This tension over class had roiled the league’s relationship with colonial administrators since the inception of its sponsored settlement efforts. However, the league’s class preferences not only reflected its concern about the lack of satisfying work for genteel, unmarried women in Germany but also the growing public outrage in Germans in South West Africa regarding the immorality of sponsored working-class German servant women. Previous chapters have described how the alleged lewd behavior and man-chasing of the sponsored maids offended settlers’ understandings of white women’s respectability, and some compared these servants negatively against the greater circumspection of many German settler men’s biracial wives. Notions of respectability typically diverged between Europe and settler colonies, especially early in the settlement process. In South Africa and Australia, for example, historians depict the cyclical arrival and departure of migrants; their sudden accumulation (and loss) of wealth—often through violent exploitation and appropriation—and the unreliability of newcomers’ claims to high status in the homeland were among the many factors that cast doubt on individual colonists’ respectability. Prominent white women therefore consciously established exclusive networks and rituals of sociability for respectable whites, whereas white men could socialize more broadly. Unlike contemporary Europe, where displays of material wealth often conferred respectability or status, in the colonies gossip served a more important role. In particular, talk by and about women provided fellow white settlers with the personal information to allow them to distinguish respectable from disreputable individuals. As settler colonies developed, however, members of the aspiring middle-classes defended themselves against any taint of personal scandal, and worked to earn social recognition through emulating the standards of decency of the metropole.6 In South West Africa, gossip served a similar role. However, evidence suggests that sponsored settlement of hundreds of working-class white maids from Germany disrupted the nascent class structure among whites. Some of the newly arrived servant women enjoyed rapid upward mobility through marriage, or downward mobility through unwanted pregnancies, unemployment, and other hardships. The volatility of their situations undermined fellow whites’ efforts to assert the inherent respectability of white women. In addition, white housewives aspiring to greater social heights both needed and wanted more access to household servants to establish their own status as ladies of leisure. Some newspaper editorials questioned whether white settler women should perform manual housework at all, or simply leave such work to Africans. In January 1911 the Southwest Herald depicted how the spouse of one well-to-do farmer took pride in conducting manual labor for her commercial dairy and refused to hire Africans to do it: “A lady of great refinement recently told us that she personally churns the quite respectable amount of butter that her cattle farm supplies.” In addition, the piece commended the league for its successes in providing adult white servants for the colony, while criticizing that many of these women broke their contracts early to marry.7

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Not surprisingly, this largely favorable review of the Women’s League’s efforts to sponsor unmarried servant women for the territory soon provoked a rejoinder to the paper that quickly spread to other territorial newspapers. The dispute centered not only over the preferred social origins and proper labor of white women in the colony, but also as to the quality of the organization’s previous recruits. The strongest of these rebuttals was a letter to the editor of the independent newspaper Südwest which welcomed in principle the colonization of more white women and girls. The author identified a number of shortcomings in the league’s servant-settlement scheme, though not all were the fault of the organization: On the one hand, the families . . . do not spell out the work duties of the desired maid clearly and precisely enough, and many times also because the maid exaggerates . . . her abilities and her willingness to work. On the other hand, the maids often find the position utterly unlike [what] they were led to expect . . . and are disappointed. . . . They must perform work to which they are unaccustomed or that they find beneath them. Neither side conducts themselves well. Misunderstandings and hard words ensue, and the maid leaves her position and sits in the street. Or she is not collected upon her arrival and falls into unscrupulous hands. Outlining how several inherent flaws marred the league’s current system of selecting maids to sponsor to South West Africa, the editorialist argued for greater oversight and assistance of newly arrived German servants, both by local league chapters and by the white community at large. Indeed, the author concludes that, given the severity of these problems, it would be better if the league simply ended its program altogether. Colonial employers could then enlist family members or other reliable acquaintances in Germany to directly select domestics who would match their particular needs and still would qualify for the same emigration subsidy from the Colonial Society.8 The Colonial Society’s archival files attest that numerous immigrant servants experienced disputes with employers. Unattached white women had few other respectable options for work in the colony beyond domestic service, so losing their contractual positions resulted in hardship. A number of the servants who left employment of their own volition or who lost their positions took up unmarried residence with settler men, providing confirmation of fellow whites’ general suspicions about the morals of working-class maids. Limited occupations were open to unemployed white women in South West Africa, which meant that many had to choose between the potential disadvantages of a new position in domestic service and other, less socially acceptable means of support such as prostitution or cohabiting with a white man. Colonial police and administrators, who kept records on residency and reported regularly on the well-being of the Colonial Society’s sponsored colonists, often described such women as standing in bad repute. Police sometimes

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cited such situations as a public nuisance to coerce the women into taking up more respectable living arrangements.9 One tempting alternative to the domestic service in South West Africa was the possibility of better-paid service work in stores, restaurants, public houses, cafés, and hotels. In South Africa, too, white women preferred work in shops and cafés to domestic service, where they earned higher salaries as well. Nonetheless, the league and Colonial Society sought to prevent their recruits’ employment in taverns as hostesses or barmaids, positions associated with dubious morality. Respectable colonists viewed public houses where white women employees entertained predominantly male guests and plied them with alcohol as dangerous sites where these women might lapse into promiscuity or casual prostitution. German district officials claimed that local vice agents kept a watchful eye on pubs to prevent unregistered prostitutes from seeking patrons, suggesting that white women who served in working-class drinking establishments were automatically suspect. The Colonial Society and Women’s League flatly rejected employer requests for female employees who would serve liquor, and withheld return fares from women who worked in these establishments. However, the society determined that its recruits could work respectably in a restaurant, inn, or hotel, provided the women did not serve alcohol. After a number of league members in South West Africa complained that the German colonial administration had approved many requests for maids from questionable employers, Hedwig Heyl wrote to Governor Seitz in May 1911 to complain about these approvals by district officers of bar and hotel owners with bad reputations.10 Now, Heyl reassessed the placement process to weed out these applicants. The league board appointed a network of local trustees in local chapters in South West Africa, particularly the wives and female relatives of prominent officials and pastors. She arranged that these local club members would now vet all prospective employers. Though colonial police often displayed intimate knowledge of the personal affairs of most colonists in their jurisdictions, they rarely rejected employers’ applications for subsidized servants from Germany. Nonetheless, Governor Seitz was glad to relinquish the responsibility.11 German officials treated household situations delicately because white patriarchs’ honor also rested in the reputations of their households. Denied applicants might seek damages against the state, whereas the league’s decisions were private, and thus not subject to the same public accountability. The new vetting system for prospective employers relied on local league trustees’ informal and arbitrary assessments of the class background and social reputation of potential employers to safeguard immigrant maids’ reputations. Officials noted defensively that one bar where local Women’s League chapter members alleged had a “notorious reputation” had broken no laws, apart from serving “common people and Boers.”12 Unsubstantiated gossip about colonists now could restrict their access to cheap servants from Germany, and local chapter members, includ-

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ing the prominent and influential Windhoek chair Frida Voigts, likely enjoyed a new authority not only to pass judgment on neighbors, but also to reject certain applicants as unsuitable.

Surveillance and Criticism of the League’s Servants Trustees may have replaced district officers in vetting employers, but officials maintained their watch over the community’s behavior, intervening when white newcomers or others went astray and contacting the sponsoring organizations in Germany for assistance. For example, local police reacted with concern when the recently arrived maid Frieda B. left her position in Windhoek after a scolding from her employer. According to reports from district officials, she first sought the help of a man living in Karibib whom she had met on her passage to South West Africa, but she split with him because she claimed he offered her only a life of prostitution. He, in turn, accused her of carrying on with colonial soldiers. Eventually, Frieda B. encountered a male acquaintance from her village in Germany who agreed to shelter her. Police arranged for her to work at a more respectable position in a railroad workers’ mess hall, but she rejected this offer, preferring to live on her companion’s salary. Eventually, she married an entirely different man, presumably after the earlier arrangement ended.13 The various colonial officials who detailed her romantic entanglements reflect close administrative investigations into her personal life but they also acted on avid community gossip and outrage in urging her to more circumspect behavior. The informal sexual unions of white working-class servants entailed the risk of unmarried pregnancy. Archival records reveal that at least a few bore illegitimate children, which jeopardized their continuing in domestic service. Some were fortunate: Anna B., for example, remained in her original position as a maid on a Geigogab farm after giving birth to a daughter, for whom she was allowed to act as primary caregiver. The satisfactory resolution surprised local authorities, who sought to identify the father without success and determined he was still in Germany.14 More usually, when a maid developed a notorious reputation, she lost her position because she represented a potential threat to the good name of her white employers. Single white mothers in South West Africa largely faced their situations without notable community acceptance or assistance, and no archival indications suggest clubwomen from the Women’s League exerted any effort for them. Such cases of unmarried liaisons and pregnancies no doubt contributed to other German settlers’ reluctance to hire the league’s maids, thus casting further doubt on the organization’s respectability, its apparently lax oversight, and its poor choices of prospective female employees from Germany. One of the most trenchant critics of the immorality of the sponsored maids was the longtime colonist Baroness Helene von Falkenhausen. She was a prominent

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colonialist author from South West Africa, a daughter of a civil official who elevated herself by marrying into nobility, only to be widowed during the Herero War, after which she returned to Germany for a few years to earn her living as a lecturer and a teacher. Her precarious finances and social position following her husband’s death may have contributed to her anxiety regarding her acquired social status. Upon her return to South West Africa, Falkenhausen was especially dismissive of the Women’s League and its working-class servant recruits: “As you know, most of the girls that the league has sent out have not conducted themselves properly, and of the league, I hear nothing but griping over their business conduct, correspondence, etc. Loud complaints, that you will be more knowledgeable about! . . . No one wants to hear about German maids any more. I find that maidservants, as we know them at home, have no place here, since in general one has black servants for all the heavy housework. Almost everyone [here] has agreed with me.”15 Falkenhausen revealed her strong class and racial consciousness, which defined genteel white women as the ideal colonists. Bolstered by the scandalous reputation of the league’s sponsored maids, Falkenhausen advocated for recruiting more German women from respectable, middle-class backgrounds as domestics—a project in which she had a vested interest in her work as an educator preparing German women as colonial employees or future settler housewives.

The German Movement for Women’s Colonial Education Educational opportunities for German women remained limited in the era before World War I, although women’s home economics education was well established in Germany. The chair of the Women’s League, Hedwig Heyl, had established ties to women’s education; in 1890 she had founded a women’s school to promote city gardening prior to her work in the league. Readers will recall that a major colonial advocate and moral reformer, Dr. Ernest Albert Fabarius, founded a colonial school for German men, the Colonial School in 1898 in Witzenhausen (an der Werra) in northeastern Hessen near Kassel. After colonial settler and author Helene von Falkenhausen returned to Germany after being widowed in the Herero War in South West Africa, Fabarius appointed her as headmistress of the first colonial school for women to open its doors in Germany. The school started instruction in April 1908, but could not meet ongoing expenses. The first class was a meager four women, which was not surprising given its expensive tuition, room, and board totaling 1,100 marks, placing it well outside the means of most German families. Disagreements soon emerged within the school’s management, since despite the heavy representation of women’s groups in the board of trustees, the school’s executive committee was all male and Fabarius, as director, controlled the curriculum. Although the Witzenhausen campus was superficially coeducational, the male students also resisted the presence of women. Fabarius recommended distancing the

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women’s from the men’s campus by 1909. By then Falkenhausen had resigned; she was determined to return to South West Africa to found her own colonial Lehrfarm (Teaching Farm) for German women. She founded a working farm in the town of Brakwater, about twenty kilometers outside Windhoek, where white middle-class female students could study local methods of housekeeping and farm work.16 The Women’s Colonial School in Germany continued to struggle until a wellknown rural women’s home economics educator Ida von Korzfleisch took up the challenge. Korzfleisch had founded the Reifenstein Schools, a group of affiliated institutions of higher education training women in rural home economics and assisting them in finding employment. Korzfleisch and several of her associates revived the Women’s Colonial School in Germany in October 1911 as a subsection of a larger, existing women’s home economics school in Bad Weilbach, near Wiesbaden. The revived Women’s Colonial School received a state subsidy of 500 marks per student, and its curriculum expanded to a year and a half, to include three months of residence at a hospital to learn basic medical care, with an emphasis on maternal and pediatric health. Accordingly, tuition and living expenses had risen to 1,400 marks, placing it even further outside the reach of most German families. The school’s colonial education program enrolled about twenty-five women in total during its three years of operation, until the start of the World War I in 1914.17 Significant differences and rivalries soon emerged between the educational institutions designed to prepare German women for work in overseas in the colonies, a category that not only included the Women’s Colonial school and Falkenhausen’s Teaching Farm, but also the domestic training for servants offered within the Homeland House dormitory. Graduates from these various endeavors competed for employment openings in South West Africa, and many took advantage of the German Colonial Society’s subsidized settlement scheme. (The Colonial Society also sponsored a few pupils from the Catholic Women’s Colonial Housekeeping School located in Carthause to South West Africa, another small endeavor about which little information is available.)18 So, the Colonial Society also was deeply interested in evaluating the respective successes of the various schemes to train women for work in South West Africa. After leaving Germany and the Women’s Colonial School in March 1909, Falkenhausen set out to realize her dream of establishing a Teaching Farm in South West Africa, a new kind of colonial education that would better prepare the daughters of respectable families for employment on local farms and ranches. She argued that a school situated in South West Africa would offer the most direct way for women to learn practical colonial household management while they sought professional engagements. Falkenhausen quickly drew support from both the German Colonial Office and the Colonial Society. She even agreed to work in limited cooperation placing graduates and interns from the reopened Women’s Colonial School in Bad Weilbach after 1911.19

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Falkenhausen envisioned that her new establishment would serve as a training ground for refined women from good German families and place them as ladies’ helps, farm assistants, housekeepers, teachers, and office workers throughout South West Africa. She also hoped to assist aspiring businesswomen to open their own laundries, cafés, and seamstress shops in the colonies, though few of her grandiose educational proposals ever materialized. Her planned school was to operate as a working farm, where students would learn housework and agricultural chores, such as cooking, ironing, washing, cleaning, gardening, dairying, and poultry care over a residency of six months. Officially, her students paid a tuition of 450 marks per quarter for two quarters’ instruction, after which Falkenhausen would help place them in paid positions. Former students who were out of work could return to stay at the farm temporarily, and such lodgers would be offered a reduced rate if they performed housework. In practice, however, most of Falkenhausen’s so-called students seem to have regarded the farm as a hostel, rather than a school, since she charged them room and board by the month, week, or day.20 In addition to instructing genteel white women, Falkenhausen also intended her farm school to train African women for employment as maids, at the same time providing instruction for colonial novices on how to instruct and manage African servants. Her scheme presumed that heavy labor was the responsibility of the African workers, not her white students. Unfortunately, Falkenhausen discovered that African workers were in short supply, leaving her without adequate labor even to maintain her farm. Nor did her students fulfill their own expected contributions to the farm labor. Brakwater Farm had dormitory space for seven women, and hosted about sixteen over her first four or so months of operation, suggesting short tenures. The farm venture yielded little profit, and the Colonial Society declined her urgent request for a further subsidy in December 1910 to help shore up her operations.21 To further compound Falkenhausen’s difficulties, she sensed animosity from local Women’s League members, who must have been aware of her low opinion of their organization and its sponsored servants. She also feared serious consequences from the suicide of one of her earliest guests. Falkenhausen insisted that the woman had shot herself in despair over a step-parent’s illness in Germany, but worried that local gossips had distorted the facts: “At first, I was afraid for the continued survival of the Teaching Farm, since naturally in Windhoek the story was being told by everyone and in highly embellished form.” In fact, there is no further archival record of this tragedy, or any indication of its damage to her school’s reputation. Despite her fears that scandal would doom her venture, Falkenhausen claimed that she still had many more offers from employers than women to fill them. However, the openings mainly were for menial positions that were unsuitable for her students.22 Falkenhausen’s program languished through 1911 and might have closed without the intercession of a friend in Germany. Charlotte Sprandel, the Württemberg

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regional leader of the Women’s League from the Stuttgart chapter, stepped in to help recruit more students for the farm. Sprandel had a warm relationship with the Colonial Society because she devoted much of her chapter’s energy to raising funds for Mecklenburg’s pet project, the Elisabeth House maternity hospital in South West Africa. She approached President Mecklenburg in January 1912 to explore the possibility of the Colonial Society chartering the Brakwater farm as a second dormitory in South West Africa to promote greater settlement for unmarried German women as employees, especially to recruit more genteel women. She also tried but failed to enlist the Women’s League executive board, proposing that the organization designate the Teaching Farm as its official dormitory in the territory’s north.23 In contrast, President Mecklenburg considered Sprandel’s idea to contract with Falkenhausen’s farm as a new hostel for selected sponsored servants, and he confidentially asked Governor Theodor Seitz, among others, for his opinion as to Falkenhausen’s suitability for the task of caring for and finding employment for greater numbers of immigrant women from Germany. These private inquiries did not produce glowing testimonials either for her Teaching Farm or for Falkenhausen. Historically, women have been stereotyped as the purveyors and subjects of gossip. In assessing the Teaching Farm, however, several settler men demonstrated their conversance in the local gossip about Falkenhausen and her endeavors. In particular, Windhoek Colonial Society chapter member Gustav Thomas passed on the view of local colonists: “The opinion of the Teaching Farm in general is not exactly a good one.” Still, Mecklenburg did not abandon the idea outright, perhaps viewing the partnership as an opportunity to bypass the Women’s League and thus undermine its national leadership’s authority.24 In July 1912 Mecklenburg granted Falkenhausen’s program a temporary trial with a nine-month probationary period conducted under nearly the same arrangements as with the Women’s League own sponsored immigrants, and the contract was patterned on the one for the Homeland House. Significantly, the partnership obliged Falkenhausen to extend her hostel’s hospitality to working-class as well as middle-class women, and to assist both groups in finding employment. Charlotte Sprandel in Germany would select all the recruits for Falkenhausen’s farm. Mecklenburg’s cooperation with Falkenhausen and Sprandel deepened the longstanding tensions between the Women’s League and the Colonial Society, as may have been his intent. Heyl objected when she discovered that Sprandel, a subordinate officer in the league, would be in charge of selecting women for Falkenhausen’s hostel. In response, Mecklenburg simply directed Sprandel to secure a separate letterhead to distinguish her efforts for Falkenhausen’s farm from her activities as a league officer. His solution did little to resolve the growing tensions.25 In partnership with the Colonial Society, the Brakwater Teaching Farm soon devolved into an inexpensive women’s guesthouse, with little pretension of serving an exclusive clientele. The society subsidized the travel of prospective female colo-

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nists, including train fare (about 28 marks) from Swakopmund to Brakwater, then reimbursed Falkenhausen at a reduced rate of 3–4 marks per day for two genteel women to share a guest room. Prospective maids lived four-to-a room and worked in exchange for their room and board. For her placement services, Falkenhausen collected a fee from employers equal to her charges’ first-month salary; she pocketed a further 10 percent fee from the first month’s pay to the employee, as well.26 Local German colonists openly disparaged Falkenhausen’s venture into women’s education. By late 1913 an unnamed source remarked in the German South West African Newspaper, “The effectiveness of the instruction is not very high, and an improvement in this area would be very welcome.” The piece also claimed that Falkenhausen’s so-called Teaching Farm served more as a hostel for young ladies than as a school, suggesting, “She should develop her enterprise further, into a real institution of learning in order to justify the name of a ‘Teaching Farm.’” The newspaper subsequently reported that Falkenhausen had rechristened her enterprise as the Heimfarm (Homefarm) Brakwater in keeping with its new purpose as a guest house for women.27

Doubts and Rivalry within Women’s Colonial Education Colonial administrators both in Berlin and in South West Africa took as dim a view of women’s colonial education in Germany as they did of Falkenhausen’s efforts. When the Women’s Colonial School reopened in Bad Weilbach in 1911, Colonial Secretary Friedrich von Lindequist criticized its agricultural curriculum since white women were not customarily hired for farm work in South West Africa. When asked to assist the school’s instructors through internships on local farms, Windhoek district officer Dr. Brill’s responded with derision: “I take this opportunity to point out the uselessness of a Women’s Colonial School for our colony. Whoever has a practical bent has no need of such education, the year of study takes too long, and the cost of tuition bears no relation to local salaries. Above all, there is no demand for refined girls; maids from the lower classes are constantly valued, not housewives’ assistants from refined circles.”28 Neither Lindequist nor Brill regarded independent farming for women as a possible future for graduates, and Brill even doubted that they would be appropriate brides for simple, local farmers. Despite officials’ dismissal of colonial education programs for German women, in early 1912 Governor Theodor Seitz nonetheless promised to assist the directors of the Women’s Colonial School in finding professional openings for its graduates in South West Africa. Specifically, he urged the Women’s League, which had been provoked by the arrangement between the Colonial Society and Falkenhausen, to take on the difficult task of placing former students from the Women’s Colonial School in suitable employment. The Women’s League resolved to channel any openings in South West Africa for genteel person-

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nel to the school’s students before publicizing them openly, but few offers resulted. The first graduate entered the Homeland House.29 Likewise, Falkenhausen hoped to convince German colonists of the untapped need for her graduates and successfully publicized her venture in local newspapers to insist not only that employment was readily available for educated women in the colony, but also that they were more desirable colonists: “There is no doubt that refined women are of greater importance as culture bearers than simple maids.” Falkenhausen did not hesitate to reveal the names of several prominent families to the newspapers, who were seeking genteel servants, including Frida Voigts of the Windhoek chapter of the Women’s League, a barb against the league.30 About fourteen women graduated from the Women’s Colonial School before World War I, and the Women’s League agreed to assist in placing a number in suitable openings in the colonies, which set them in competition with Falkenhausen. Since Mecklenburg would not approve of first-class fares for subsidized servants, its graduates generally received no travel subsidies, so technically did not participate in the Colonial Society’s female colonization program. The number of genteel women who eventually settled in South West Africa through the assistance of the Colonial Society through 1914 was marginal compared to the hundreds of general servants who went to South West Africa annually. In fact, evidence suggests the increasing numbers of genteel migrants from Germany suppressed wages for these women to about the same level as the salaries for maids.31 The Women’s League’s role in placing the Women’s Colonial School’s graduates in overseas employment nonetheless represented a new beginning—not only a symbolic shift in the organization’s work toward greater cooperation with other women’s organizations, but also greater independence from the Colonial Society. As suggested earlier, the close timing between the Women’s League’s agreement with the Women’s Colonial School and Falkenhausen’s accord with the Colonial Society indicated a deepening rift within the movement to promote German women’s colonization. The standard history of the Women’s Colonial Schools at Witzenhausen and Bad Weilbach suggests that men’s attempt to dominate the first school led to its failure; once female leaders had control, they were able to achieve greater success with their second effort. This pattern resembles German men’s efforts to control female colonization efforts in South West Africa, described earlier in this book, including male organizers’ refusal to work with moderate feminists because of men’s antipathy to feminism in principle. Practically, these early efforts to establish women’s colonial schools matured only after World War I, although these beginnings represented a symbolic achievement in the Wilhelmine era. Increasingly, colonialist women leaders projected the German national need for an active role for refined women onto colonial space—one that heralded their economic and cultural value as well as their indispensability to white reproduction and family formation in South West Africa.32 Like Falkenhausen’s pretensions over

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her Teaching Farm, there was limited substance to these claims during the era of German colonial rule. If settlers and administrators raised questions about white servants’ respectability and capability, they also critiqued these new efforts at women’s colonial education. Key administrators disparaged both the intent of these schools and the quality of their students. Many of the female graduates from these institutions, freshly arrived in the colony, also were forced to navigate complex local notions of race and respectability, and faced vicious gossip when they fell short of white community ideals. Moreover, events in the colony did not occur in a vacuum; news from and about female immigrants returned to the homeland to undermine the future of sponsored women’s colonization.

Rivalry and Reputations Brakwater Home Farm and the Homeland House were comparable establishments. The Home Farm housed thirty-two women altogether during 1913, compared with forty-one enrollments in the Homeland House dormitory. Theoretically, Falkenhausen’s program competed in size with the Keetmanshoop establishment and offered colonists seeking female workers a realistic alternative to the Women’s League’s notoriously unpopular maids. The league quickly recognized that the Home Farm posed a practical threat to their work. Various members of the league began to defame Falkenhausen and her students, and vice versa. Members of the league chapter in Cassel actually spoke with and tried to dissuade several Brakwaterbound recruits from emigrating.33 Falkenhausen was vulnerable to the league’s efforts to undermine her. Germans in South West Africa complained over Helene von Falkenhausen’s exaggerated sense of prestige. She alienated many of the guests at her Home Farm and received her comeuppance when former guests spread tales about her establishment throughout the colony and even back in Germany. New colonial arrivals heading for Brakwater sometimes turned away after hearing from locals of the Home Farm’s many discomforts and of Falkenhausen’s “very peculiar character.”34 Falkenhausen despaired that settler men as well as women were spreading damaging gossip about her farm. Accordingly, she warned Sprandel, her recruiter in Germany, “I beg you to inform the girls that after they arrive in Swakopmund, if they hear something bad about it here, to make inquires. . . . It is terrible in this country, that the people are so much worse than in Germany, casting down a woman on her own and criticizing and ruining everything. Particularly unrefined [ungebildeten] people here, like the police officers, the railroad workers, and these sorts, who always ride the train with the girls in the second class, and pretend to know all about this place.”35 So, Falkenhausen described how pointed comments about her farm spread across

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social classes to rebound against both genteel and working-class servants from her establishment. Finally, the league concocted a new scheme to undermine Falkenhausen’s facility by proposing to build a new kindergarten building in Karibib, which would have sleeping quarters to house temporarily homeless and unemployed sponsored maids in the colony’s north. In addition to the Homeland House in Keetmanshoop, when they opened the Lüderitzbucht Youth Home in 1912 they attached a new dormitory room with six guest beds for sponsored female colonists in need of short-term lodging. In its first year of operation, members of the Women’s League chapter in the southern city of Lüderitzbucht had met the ships to welcome thirty-eight single young women, as well as a young wife and three young children in transit, and sheltered all of them in their local dormitory. A new, northern women’s shelter designated for the town of Karibib on the trainline from Swakopmund to Windhoek would be situated close enough to Brakwater that the facility represented serious competition for Falkenhausen’s hostel.36 Organizational infighting drew on a deep mine of colonial gossip about recently arrived sponsored women, whether they resided in the Homeland House or at Falkenhausen’s Home Farm. Each of these hostels for white women had become particular targets for local gossip. The scandals surrounding German servants offer an important barometer of German settlers’ fears and anxieties, particularly about the Women’s League programs to increase sponsored women’s settlement. Ironically, by defaming each other, the competing contingents worsened the negative perceptions of all immigrant German domestics. The sniping began before the new recruits ever reached shore in South West Africa, as women from the rival programs spied on the conduct of the other group’s charges while at sea. Although contemporary colonial novels like Lena Haase’s Raggy’s Fahrt nach Südwest (1910) romanticized the adventures of the passage to Africa, the onboard gossip exposed the grittiest details. For example, Sprandel forwarded to the Colonial Society a letter she received from a cultivated Brakwater immigrant, Thekla Dressel, reporting on the shipboard antics of an eighteen-year old Stuttgart native named Martha L., who was an urban working-class maid sponsored through the league. Dressel claimed that her fellow passenger soon acquired an unsavory nickname: “At the equatorial christening she received the name “Sea-Spout” [Seeschneppe, slang for prostitute]. That single word says it all. . . . I cannot even write about how the girls of the Women’s League behaved, because it is simply a scandal if such girls are sent to Africa to set a good example.”37 Although Dressel insisted that the recruits of the Women’s League should serve as a model of good behavior for others, it is hardly surprising that working-class German women’s shipboard behavior would spark outrage among genteel passengers. General maids and other working-class women in Wilhelmine Germany had few reservations against engaging in premarital sex, unlike respectable bourgeois women. Indeed, extramarital pregnancies and liaisons, desertion,

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separation, and divorce were common experiences among the German working classes.38 Dressel’s letter said nothing about male indiscretions, nor did the male passengers likely face sanctions from fellow whites. Working-class maids also would have been unlikely to regard the aim of their settlement in South West Africa as setting a good example. Instead, many of the single women openly sought to marry, and a notable few succeeded in attaching a fiancé onboard ship. Dressel’s letter provided welcome ammunition for Charlotte Sprandel, who forwarded it to Mecklenburg, who then castigated Heyl for the league’s inadequate vetting of their servants. He also demanded that all future candidates must be at least twenty-one (and be no older than thirty) years of age, unless colonial employers hired them directly, in an effort to minimize misbehavior from immaturity, but also to weed out women he regarded as too old to marry. In addition, her organization’s chapters must make more thorough confidential inquiries about applicants and include copies of these reports in their documentation to him: “Only through scrupulously careful selection of the young girls, after one has also received irreproachable information about their moral soundness, can complaints like the ones which have come to me recently be avoided as much as possible.”39 Mecklenburg emphasized that these new inquiries should extend to whether a recruit had been the subject of hometown gossip, although it is unclear whether Wilhelmine communities and South West African colonists shared the same social mores and standards of decorum. Still, the rival German organizations continued to spread damaging gossip against each other. The Women’s League Altona chapter, which had assumed the responsibility of seeing off recruits’ ships, made sure that the Colonial Society heard about an unpleasant scene onboard from a departing Brakwater emigrant who was dissatisfied with her third-class accommodations. They described the woman in question, whose family was from what they called openly bad circles, as dishonest, confused, and possibly emotionally disturbed. The Altona league chapter head claimed the scandalous public scene was proof that the Colonial Society should not renew Falkenhausen’s funding.40 The damage from hearsay about shipboard misconduct extended beyond the rival sponsoring organizations. As one new Home Farm arrival explained to organizer Charlotte Sprandel, the resulting gossip fed German colonists’ pervasive prejudice against all newly arrived white servants: “It is very sad that every individual suffers under this stereotype, whether she behaves in an upstanding manner or not, and that it still follows one here. . . . It hardly helps a young girl here in the colony to be met everywhere by suspicion right from the start.”41 Applicants seeking employment in South West Africa already provided the league with thick dossiers—including contracts, photographs, medical certificates, references, life histories, police certificates of conduct—all intended to weed out disreputable candidates. Ironically, once the organization forwarded these documents to district

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officials in South West Africa, their loose dossiers became fodder for public dissection and controversy about the newly arrived maids.42 Even more ironically, the colonial organizations in Germany had limited sources of information about the conduct and circumstances of their sponsored migrants after their arrival in South West Africa. In many cases, local police and officials in South West Africa were forced to rely on settlers’ commentaries for news about their sponsored women. In essence, both the Colonial Society and its Women’s League relied on this gossip from South West Africa in evaluating their recruits’ successes and failures. Naturally, when the colonial grapevine extended back to Germany, distance added to the distortions. For example, Colonial Society secretary Captain Friedrich Winkler sought the confidences of his personal acquaintances in the colonies to glean what information he could about various women’s conduct (or misconduct). Even when a matter was unusually scandalous or when a territorial newspaper picked up a tale, specifics were usually scarce, especially about risqué behavior. Unsubstantiated and partially fabricated stories filtered back to Germany only haphazardly, perhaps making them more compelling and tantalizing.43 Even genteel Brakwater dormitory residents who criticized the conduct of socially inferior Women’s League migrants remarked on the ugliness of gossip in the German settler community as well as the outright untruth of much of it. One woman rued her initial lack of discretion when personal disclosures returned to their ears in distorted form: “There is a lot of gossip here about people here in Africa, as I now know from very bitter experience. . . . As it happens, I just heard [some unpleasant gossip about me].”44 The circle of women from the Home Farm spread news about their peers, and held the power to decree which of them were so-called successful immigrants and which had not fared so well, and to report their assessments to Sprandel and others back home as fact. Falkenhausen’s reports to the Colonial Society and Sprandel detailed the individual achievements of her charges and sometimes revealed damaging intimate details about them. She seemed to take great pleasure in describing the downfall of personalities she found unsympathetic and was much more prone to pass judgment on her wards’ characters than were other available historical sources. Her disclosures typify the scrutiny placed on white women’s sexual conduct in South West Africa, where lapses into prostitution or promiscuity seem to have been the greatest transgressions that Colonial Society immigrants of all class origins might make. In April 1914 she reported to Sprandel the lurid story of one former Brakwater resident: Hedwig S.—unfortunately I must write in detail what I heard about her. . . . She lived there [in Swakopmund] in a hotel with a 22-year-old man, who, when all his money was spent, killed himself under the very eyes of the governor. S. then went to Windhoek and I was completely

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astounded to see her in a first-rate hotel, since when she left here, as she told Frl. von Gr. that she only had the money I gave her. . . . One day she traveled South in the company of an American engineer, to Cape Town. Now, however, she is back here in Windhoek, and has rented a place as a seamstress. She knows nothing of this [trade] however, as we all saw here. A certain von Roekern, who leads a somewhat dubious existence and has a wife in Germany has taken her on and with another man very often can be seen with her late at night arm in arm on the street.45 In speculating about her charges Falkenhausen reveals herself as a willing participant in an intrusive social environment in which settlers subjected the behavior of white women of all classes to community investigation, discussion, and possible censure. But Falkenhausen failed to realize how her gossip about her former charges reflected poorly on her own establishment’s reputation or her own connection to these women. In late 1913 the Colonial Society requested Governor Seitz’s reappraisal of the Brakwater program, with the suggestion that the Women’s League should take over the existing installation and perhaps employ Falkenhausen as its matron rather than building a new dormitory in Karibib. In response to Mecklenburg’s suggestion, Seitz and the chair of the Windhoek chapter of the league, Frida Voigts, visited Brakwater. Each submitted reports on the Home Farm concluding that Falkenhausen, as a single mother, was unsuited to oversee a new league dormitory. They further recommended she give up her farm altogether, which they considered understaffed, and sanctimoniously suggested that she instead concentrate on rearing her own children. Both Seitz and Voigts preferred Windhoek or Karibib as suitable locations for a new league dormitory, to be run like the Keetmanshoop program in sheltering simple maids, since they believed the demand for household domestics was steadily increasing, unlike openings for genteel women.46 Thanks to their negative assessments, the Home Farm’s future stood on shaky legs. The Homeland House dormitory soon faced equally harsh disapproval from white settlers in Keetmanshoop and beyond.

Public Scrutiny of the Homeland House The reputation of the Keetmanshoop Homeland House suffered dramatically through settler gossip. Scurrilous rumors alleged that the dormitory opened its doors to frequent outside visitors, including unattached men, and these guests encouraged license and pretension among recently arrived working women. After the dormitory hosted a number of social events for local military personnel, a flurry of anonymous letters published in colonial newspapers claimed these events

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Figure 6.1. “Heimathaus für junge Mädeln des Frauenbundes in Keetmanshoop, 1908 (“Homeland House Dormitory for Young Maids in Keetmanshoop, 1908”). Publicity Photo of the Women’s League of the German Colonial Society. https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frank furt.de/kolonialesbildarchiv/content/titleinfo/11484911 Courtesy of the Colonial Picture Archive, Goethe University Frankfurt/Main Library: urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-823682.

prompted unrealistic social and marital aspirations, depicted as the rise of delusions of grandeur among the Homeland House’s maids. Newspapers charged that these half-cultivated girls were particularly susceptible to developing megalomania as a result of the dormitory’s relaxed social rules. Close fraternization with too many male visitors had turned the maids’ heads, implying that white settler wives could never trust servants from the Women’s League around their husbands. The local grapevine also claimed that the Homeland House matron was too familiar with her charges, rather than discouraging their pretensions.47 German servants and especially Homeland House residents throughout South West Africa responded to newspaper allegations against their morals with anger. The Lüderitzbucht paper published an anonymous rebuttal from a German maid who claimed to speak for many others as she pleaded for greater racial solidarity between white employers and domestics, as well as for the responsibility of the colonial mistress to protect German maids from untoward settler men’s attentions. The author further likened her moral credentials to that of her mistress, asserting her own respectability: “Despite the fact that we must provide written character ref-

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erences in Germany, and although the Women’s League conducts inquires among third parties concerning our pasts, and that we must work for three months as a nurse in a hospital, where, as everyone knows, only young girls with spotless reputations are permitted, we are still not yet found worthy to sit at the table with our ladies.”48 Her appeal to a notion of race-based solidarity and common morality among all white women in South West Africa was doomed to fail, but points to the continued social ambiguity and forced intimacies of white servants working in middle-class German settlers’ homes. The scandal surrounding the maid’s dormitory demonstrates that group homes for unmarried white women in Africa were socially transgressive, which was the reason that women’s settlement organizers long had rejected such communal housing. The anonymous indictments of the Homeland House in the colonial press also served to remind the German community beyond Keetmanshoop of the supposed dangers that these socially unworthy and dangerously ambitious white women posed for settler families in South West Africa. Once German colonists acquired the mental picture of Homeland House as a place where promiscuous unmarried women and forward male visitors interacted under dubious circumstances, their suspicions grew to wild proportions. The Women’s League compounded the gossip by electing to transport a few noteworthy individuals who particularly scandalized local residents of Keetmanshoop. One was a young girl, Hulda K., whose father had refused to countenance her emigration. His complaints at the league’s sponsorship of her without his permission stirred the Colonial Society to investigate her more closely. This scrutiny reflected poorly on K.’s conduct in South West Africa: after arrival at the Homeland House, she allegedly refused to submit to the authority of the dormitory matron or of her new employer. Her mistress accused her of staying out all night with her fiancé and refusing to work. She soon quit her position to cohabit with a married man, but later married a different individual. She claimed mistreatment by her employer and the matron, which they denied. In mediating the dispute, the Homeland House matron, the local police, and even her former employer all undermined K.’s personal reputation. Mecklenburg was so disgusted by the situation that he demanded a police-notarized permission from the father of the next minor who sought subsidized passage.49 The residents of the Homeland House could do little to protect themselves against employers’ character assassinations, however unfounded. In reality, the league had difficulty enforcing the provisions of its contract in far-off South West Africa, and sponsored servants encountered great obstacles seeking redress in complaints against their employers, so gossip became a potent weapon in the informal disputes that flared between employers and maids.50 The settler community occasionally even took the side of the wronged employee. For example, a colonial newspaper published a long editorial condemning a German official who failed to pay for his newly arrived maid’s medical expenses.51

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Other Homeland House residents also complained about the dormitory matron. One former resident claimed the matron had refused to let her take a much better employment offer in Lüderitzbucht, forcing her to work for a farmer who made coarse verbal advances, despite her betrothal to another man, and driving her to resign. When maids resolved tensions with employers by acting out or breaking contracts and running off, they damaged settlers’ regard for the orderliness of the dormitory as well as the standards of the league in making their selections. As a hostel for unmarried women, the Homeland House’s reputation was vulnerable to the behavior of its guests. The decision to offer lodging to several local white women in distress worsened an already precarious situation. For example, Paula F. sought shelter after she was fired as a lady’s help for gross incompetence. While she was at the Homeland House, a doctor diagnosed her with severe hysteria. When the brother-in-law who had sponsored her emigration learned that she was playing the piano at the local cinema, he sought her deportation. As a teacher in the government school in Kub, Paul H. clearly believed his family’s honor to be at risk, as he explained in his petition to the district officer, “I would like to have her removed as quickly as possible from the territory, as, apart from her conduct, my reputation is being harmed through the spread of slander.”52 Such female guests, including recently unemployed women with dubious reputations, heightened the vulnerability of the guesthouse and all its current and former residents to scandal, as well as the league itself. She was one of a number of women diagnosed with mental illnesses among the settler women in this study, whose behavior outside the white moral norms resulted in medical diagnoses.

Scandal in the Homeland House The most notorious incident implicating the Homeland House occurred in May 1912, when an unmarried female guest died after childbirth in the home. Local public outrage over the incident finally gained the attention of the German Colonial Society’s central office in Berlin several months later. General secretary Captain Winkler launched a confidential inquiry to the affair by contacting the physician, Dr. E. Kannegießer, who was head of the society’s Elisabeth-House maternity hospital in Windhoek, for more information. Winkler asked the doctor to investigate a complicated rumor that had reached Germany that the Homeland House residents were operating a makeshift clinic for childbirths and abortions among the colony’s unmarried white maids, and Winkler made clear that his chief concern to avoid any damage to the society or its president: It has come to our ears that in the Homeland House in Keetmanshoop, a delivery room has been set up and that among the girls we have sent there, two have acted as midwives. Furthermore, there is a rumor cir-

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culating that in the Homeland House . . . crimes have been committed against the seed of life [i.e., abortion], and the legal authorities have stepped in. . . . We are obliged to confront the rumors or at least to clarify the matter and see how things lie, so that it does not come back to roost on the Colonial Society, specifically on His Highness [Mecklenburg].53 The gist of the rumors seemed to be that that the league, or at least its dormitory matron, had planned a Homeland House obstetrical facility that not only would deliver out-of-wedlock babies, but that also performed abortions—and, moreover, that the Colonial Society subsidized this arrangement. The stories may have been partly fueled by the league’s charitable impulse, which had led them to host medical care on site for some white women, including the childbirth that took place there. Many in the local community spread claims that the facility condoned or encouraged sexual improprieties on its premises, and perhaps even operated as a clandestine bordello. However predictable, the scandal dealt a crippling blow to the reputation of the Women’s League as well as to the Colonial Society, and tarnished the reputations of its former inhabitants throughout South West Africa.54 Dr. Kannegießer acknowledged to Winkler that he had heard a series of dubious tales (“the famous African stories”) about the Homeland House. However, he obtained more-credible information from a Women’s Red Cross Association for the Colonies nurse who had been stationed in Keetmanshoop. Her version concerned a servant, Fräulein M., whose name does not appear on the official Colonial Society transportation list, but whose pregnancy allegedly began during the overseas passage. She was already in a position with a local family when her condition became visible, at which point she was cast out of their home and forced to seek shelter in the Homeland House, where she allegedly delivered a premature stillbirth. Frl. M. was seriously ill after the birth, and was admitted to the local military hospital, where she died after a few days.55 The lurid rumors that illegitimate births and perhaps even abortions took place at the Homeland House quickly spread within the close German community of Keetmanshoop, although any official inquires that followed did not result in criminal charges. Local missionary Wandres made clear that the public image of the home had long been raising eyebrows, whatever Women’s League representatives in Berlin might or might not have known. Colonial Society secretary Winker remained convinced that conditions in the hostel “must have been absolutely scandalous,” and that its residents were not “suitable wives for the colony.56 Although both he and Heyl downplayed the scandal by publicly dismissing the stories about the dormitory as empty gossip, a colonial newspaper speculated that the number of offers of marriage to residents of the dormitory had dropped off recently.57 Whether or not the pervasive gossip and scandals surrounding the women’s settlement programs now had widely damaged the status of German women in

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the colony, signs were growing that the Colonial Society was preparing to end its support. In early 1913 General Secretary Winkler solicited from Dr. Kannegießer a “completely private answer to an equally private question.” His query was prompted by hearing the views of a number of farmers in the northern colony who thought that “the whole maids-export from Germany is nonsense (an opinion that I naturally cannot evaluate), and that it is much more important that the various districts of the colony have hospitals, even small ones.” Winkler himself proposed that founding new hospitals and maternity wards in South West Africa would be a “more appropriate” project than “sending out a lot of maids.”58 His maneuvering behind the scenes indicated his intent to quash funding permanently for the women’s settlement program as a failed exercise.

Reassessment of Sponsored Women’s Settlement As early as January 1912, Colonial Society president Mecklenburg informed the league that he was reevaluating the entire sponsored settlement program to gauge its actual success in achieving its intended aims as well as its cost-effectiveness. For the first time, he refused a prospective employer’s request for a travel subsidy for a hotel cook at a high salary of 100 marks per month. As he explained his decision, the hotelier clearly was too prosperous to qualify for travel assistance: “rich business people or companies should not receive awards.” A few months later, in March, he further complained about a report in the most recent Women’s League publication that demonstrated the prospective cook had received a travel subsidy in spite of his denial; moreover, he remonstrated that the article failed to credit the Colonial Society for funding applicants’ travel grants. Annoyed by these affronts, Mecklenburg requested additional information on the forty Homeland House residents to date whom the society and the league had assisted, in particular whether they were still in the dormitory or had found employment or married. The league’s response was neither complete nor impressive. General Secretary von Hatten reported that five of the women had married, two had returned to Germany, and one had found alternative employment before she reached the hostel. Of the remainder, about twenty had known positions, but the league lacked information on thirteen servants.59 The reason for Mecklenburg’s inquiry about the Homeland House became apparent the following month, when leaders of the Colonial Society and League began to discuss whether to continue further subsidies for women’s settlement. The Colonial Welfare lottery, which had funded the society’s efforts since 1898, had been authorized for twenty years, and so would be exhausted in six years. Proceeds from the lottery were projected to reach about 5 million marks.60 Still, by my rough estimates, only about 370,000 marks (worth around $2.4 million

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today) would have been sufficient to cover the program costs for the full total of 2,272 women and children subsidized to travel to South West Africa between 1898 and 1914. Mecklenburg suggested that, in the future, subsidized servants (but not the other categories of assisted migrants) would be required to repay the cost of their steamship passages through monthly installments from their salaries.61 League officials persuaded Mecklenburg that, instead, the league should impose a fee on prospective colonial employers. Soon, the league set the fee at a standard rate of 30 marks. In mid-1913, in response to colonial employers’ demands that placement fees be reimbursed when maids left their positions prematurely, the league revised its servant contract requiring signatories to repay their ship passage in monthly installments if they failed to enter the stipulated dormitory, or if they left their employment in the first year without grounds.62 As Mecklenburg imposed these new rules, he made clear that he wanted to contain the cost of the servant settlement program, and he also grew especially restrictive in granting return fares to applicants. Not only did each returnee represent a failure for the program and a waste of the initial expense, but in addition the full steamship return fare (250 marks) was much higher than the discounted passage of 150 marks to the colony. Mecklenburg eventually altered the society’s contractual obligation so that the right to a return fare explicitly lapsed if the immigrant left her first employer of her own volition, married, served a high-ranking administrator, started her own business, or entered improper employment to work at a bar. Furthermore, in 1913 the contractual employment obligation was lengthened from two to three years.63 Perhaps Mecklenburg had grown weary of ongoing friction between the society and the league, or perhaps he was fed up with the scandals its servants provoked, but he seemed ready to call a halt to the program. The league had long been eager to assume full responsibility for women’s employment in South West Africa. However, Mecklenburg also began weighing the value of the Colonial Society’s sponsored settlement initiatives overall, seeking to measure the program’s demographic impact. The society annually forwarded a list of the previous year’s migrants to the colonial governor’s office, which in turn circulated them to local officials seeking updates on their circumstances. However, in January 1913 Mecklenburg also requested a composite official report on all subsidized passengers to South West Africa from 1898 through 1910, providing a list of names of all those whom officials had stated were still resident in South West Africa in prior annual reports: 953 of the original 1,119 individuals (85 percent).64 In addition, in February 1914 Mecklenburg requested further evaluation from the German Colonial Office whether the demand for servants in South West Africa was subsiding. Local district officers offered a range of responses to the formal inquiry. Keetmanshoop, for example, reported that the local need for white women

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workers was far from satisfied: “If young maids from the German Colonial Society returned, then it was . . . usually not a shortage of employment opportunities at fault, but rather other causes—illness, nervousness, personal unsuitability for employment local business enterprises, disappointment about life in Africa—which is imagined differently back home—and, finally, non-fulfillment of a desire to marry.” Other local officials confirmed that the colony required further German servant women’s settlement, though Deputy Governor Oscar Hintrager added his own tart observation privately to Colonial Minister Solf in Berlin: “The demand would be even greater if the Colonial Women’s League had not had little luck in some individual instances in choosing those to be sent out.”65 Despite the official confirmation of a continued need for further sponsored servant women’s settlement, officials seemed to recognize the scandalous reputations of the league’s recruits to date.

Conclusion Ample evidence allowed Mecklenburg to assess the program as a failure by mid1914, after the South West African governor’s office in Windhoek offered a full report on the results of subsidized settlement between 1898 and 1910. The dossier finally arrived in Berlin only a few months before the outbreak of World War I ended the dubious women’s settlement program.66 The report is often terse and unforthcoming: colonial officials rarely commented on the private family life of German settlers, remarking only, “Doing well [Ergehen gut],” and “ditto.” Occasionally, a bureaucrat might note a particular family’s apparent prosperity or their many children, but even such notations are rare. In fact, superior officers often excised underlings’ more forthcoming personal comments from the final document, perhaps deeming them inappropriate gossip. District officials’ final report as well as their more detailed notes preserved in the governor’s archival records provide useful information about the settlement scheme. Police traced many of the participants to new locales, and dropped persons from their records only when they died, left the colony, or vanished completely. Obviously, families and married persons were more visible and thus easier to trace than highly mobile single women workers, whose precarious existences sometimes meant they changed locations without notifying authorities or gave up their maiden names upon marriage. Still officials eventually accounted for the whereabouts of all but forty-nine persons (4.4 percent). The report offered a numerical assessment for Mecklenburg’s review, indicating that 661 (69 percent) of individuals listed in the report counted as living in favorable circumstances in South West Africa: 288 of them were married, but 273 (including 90 minors) were still single. The report deemed another 292 individuals

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as unsuccessful cases, including 260 who were untraceable or who had left the colony. The remaining 32 undesirable outcomes included 10 widows and 17 deceased, but a further 5 also found themselves in unsatisfactory circumstances: one was a prostitute, the others were impoverished or otherwise unhappy. The reported 272 unaccounted for, dead, or departed sponsored settlers (31  percent) when added to the 166 individuals previously listed as absent from an original group of 1,119 migrants, represent 35 percent combined (438 of 1,119), indicating the waste of more than one-third of the Colonial Society’s total expenditures. Data confirm a high rate of servant returns: those who emigrated as employees comprised the largest category of participants: 715 of 2,272 (31 percent) of the entire program. According to the report, however, sponsored servants were least likely to stay in the colony: more than half (52.9 percent) of the female employees through 1910 either had left the colony or become untraceable. In sum, the sponsored servants not only generated the most public controversy, but they were also the worst bet to become long-term settlers. The overall consensus of Seitz’s colonial administration in South West Africa, as reported to the Berlin Colonial Office, was that the colony urgently needed white women as much as before.67 However, the scandal surrounding the subsidized servants meant they were far less attractive to white settlers as workers or as brides. The gossip about German maids embarrassed both the Colonial Society and its Women’s League, undermining and delegitimizing the notion of organized women’s colonization in South West Africa. When stories such as alleged misconduct in the Keetmanshoop Homeland House percolated back to Germany, both the league and the society developed new policies and procedures meant to restrict and punish their charges rather than safeguard them. Nonetheless, these efforts at damage control proved unsuccessful. Every new rumor about the maids only seemed to confirm settlers’ already dismal views of them. Arguably, South West African settlers shared divergent values and mores from metropolitan Germans, and the community’s unresolved tensions over interracial sexuality made them especially suspicious of white women’s morality. Sources also made clear that German settler men were just as active as German women in spreading gossip. Ironically, the colonial organizations that sponsored German women’s settlement relied on this gossip from South West Africa to assess the success of their programs. As became increasingly clear, when white settlers circulated the story of sponsored German servants in South West Africa, the tale had an unhappy ending. Their scandalous behavior reverberated against organizations that assisted them, and many left the colony when their contracts expired. By 1914 longstanding efforts to promote women’s settlement in South West Africa increasingly looked like a failed experiment. The Colonial Society’s retreat from the sponsored women’s settlement seemed inevitable when World War I halted overseas travel, making the question moot.

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Notes 1. Gluckman, “Gossip and Scandal,” 10. 2. Quote from DSWA, L.II.g.8, Bd. 2, 14 and reverse. Windhoek District Office, Fromm, to the Kaiserliche Gouvernement, 22 May 1911. Suggestions for the Deutsch-Südwestafrika. Amtlicher Ratgeber für Auswanderer, 4th ed. (Berlin, Dietrich Reimer, 1912) proposal to amend page 39. 3. Quote from DSWA, L.II.g.8, Bd. 2, 14 and reverse, see also 31 reverse. Windhoek District Office, Fromm, to the Kaiserliche Gouvernement, 22 May 1911. 4. Gertrud von Hatten, “Zur Frauenfrage in Deutsch-Südwest-Afrika,” Berliner Neuesten Nachrichten, Beiblatt (Berlin, 31 July 1912). Clipping in DSWA, L.II.h.1. 56 5. Quote from Gertrud von Hatten, “Die Frauenfrage in den deutschen Kolonien, 4. Fortsetzung,” KH. 6, no. 19 (1912–13): 8. 6. Kirsten MacKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies: Sydney and Cape Town, 1820–1850 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005), 36–38, 56–57. 7. Quote from “Frauen und Kinder in die Kolonien!, III,” Südwestbote 8, no. 4 (14 Jan. 1911). 8. Baronin v. Maltzahn quoted in “Von der Arbeit des Frauenbundes und ähnlichem,” Südwest 2, no. 11 (7 Feb. 1911). 9. All emigrant numbers derive from DKG 183, the Colonial Society’s complete registry of sponsored migrants. Regarding emigrant number 326, see DSWA, L.II.m.2. Bd.1., 34–35; regarding emigrant number 334, see DSWA L.II.k.2, Bd. 1, 39; for emigrant number 941, see DSWA.L.II.m.2, Bd. 1, 131. 10. Berger, Threads of Solidarity, 34–35; Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics, 140; DSWA, L.II.k.1, Bd. 2, 61–62, Heyl, Berlin, to Governor Seitz, Windhoek, 2 May 1911, On the discussion between the Colonial Society and league denying return fares to “Bardamen,” see DKG 156, 436, and 380–84. 11. DSWA, L.II.k.1, Bd. 2, 61-62. Heyl, Berlin, to Governor Seitz, Windhoek, 2 May 1911, DSWA, L.II.k.1, Bd. 2, 72-76, Seitz, Windhoek, to Hedwig Heyl, Berlin, 17 July 1911. 12. DSWA, L.II.k.1, Bd. 2, 26 reverse, quoted from police report from Ortspolizei, Windhoek dated 18 May 1911. 13. Emigrant register number 326, in DSWA, L.II.m.2, Bd.1, 34-35. See also Frieda B.’s entry in the South West African administration official report on migrant welfare from 1913, DKG 182, 82. 14. Emigrant number 1632, Anna B. was an immigrant from Berlin, see DSWA, L.II.m.2, Bd. 2, 81-82. 15. DKG 606, 17 quoted from Freifrau Helene von Falkenhausen to Colonial Society Secretary, Dr. Karl Sanders, Berlin, 31 October 1909. 16. Wildenthal, German Women, 166. Falkenhausen’s biography is available online: https:// www.namibiana.de/namibia-information/who-is-who/autoren/infos-zur-person/hel ene-von-falkenhausen.html (accessed 22 Feb. 2022). 17. Mechtild Rommel and Hulda Rautenberg Witzenhausen: Die kolonialen Frauenschulen von 1908-1945 (Witzenhausen: Gesamthochschule Kassel, Fachbereich Internationale Agrarwirtschaft in Witzenhausen, 1983), 12–25; Venghiattis, “Mobilizing,” 251. 18. FB General Secretary Gertrud von Hatten, “Die Frauenfrage in den deutschen Kolonien, IV,” KH 6, no. 19 (1912–13): 8. 19. “Eine neue Kolonialfrauenschule in Deutschland,” Südwest 2, no. 24 (24 Mar. 1911); letter from Falkenhausen to Stabsarzt Sanders, DKG, 31 Oct. 1909. 20. “Frauen-Lehrfarm bei Brakwater,” WN 7, no. 67 2tes. Blatt (20 Aug. 1910); DKG 606, 40, copy of standard contract, stamped 19 Dec. 1910. 21. DKG 606, 34. Falkenhausen’s prospectus, 43-45, “Report on the Lehrfarm Brakwater,” no date, remarks on several of the facility’s problems. DKG 606, 47, Winker, Colonial Society secretary, to Falkenhausen, 22 Dec. 1910 declines further funds.

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22. DKG 606, 17, quote from Falkenhausen’s letter to Dr. Sanders, 31 Oct. 1909. 23. “Vorstandssitzung in Hamburg,” KH 5, no. 36 (1911–12). 24. On the historical linkage between women and gossip, see Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 30; and Melanie Tebbut, Women’s Talk? A Social History of “Gossip” in Working-Class Neighbourhoods, 1880–1960 (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1995), which claims it empowers women in the social sphere. Quote from an Abschrift of a letter from a Windhoek Colonial Society member, Gustav Thomas currently in Hagen, Westphalia, 24 May 1912, DKG 607, 462. 25. DKG 607, 421-22, Abschrift of letter from Falkenhausen to Sprandel, 12 Mar. 1912 and, 433, 10 Apr. 1912; DKG 156, 335, letter from Colonial Society officer Holleben to Heyl, 1 Aug. 1912. 26. DKG 607, Bl. 406, Sprandel to Falkenhausen 26 July 1912, lays out the terms of the agreement. 27. “Die Lehrfarm,” DSWAZ 16, no. 81 (17 July 1913). “Aus Windhuk. Die Heimfarm Brakwater,” DSWAZ 16, no. 97 (23 Aug. 1913). 28. DSWA, L.II.h.4, Bd. 1, 1a to 1i, Mecklenburg, Braunschweig, to Governor Seitz, 18 Mar. 1911; and Abschrift, Lindequist to Mecklenburg, 31 Mar. 1911; District Officer Brill, Windhoek, to the Governor’s Office, 22 Apr. 1911. Quoted from Brill, (1d). 29. DSWA, L.II.h.4, Bd. 1, l-l to 3, Director Hoffmann to the Governor’s office, 9 Apr. 1912; 23-26, Governor’s Office to Hoffmann, 17 Oct. 1912 and response, 40-41, 19 Nov. 1912. 5354, Agreement with the Women’s League 30. Quoted from “Der Frauenbund der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft,” DSWAZ 15, no 50 (21 Jun 1912). See also “Gebildete Mädchen für Deutsch Südwestafrika,” SZ 1, no. 99 (12 Sept. 1912). 31. DKG 607, 182-83. Falkenhausen to Sprandel (Abschrift) 29 May 1913 on wages dropping. DKG 985, 270-71, Hoffmann, Kassel, to Mecklenburg, 8 Mar. 1913, Postrat Hoffmann, head of the school’s board of directors, expressed outrage at the Colonial Society travel policy. The number of pupils enrolled in the Women’s Colonial School in 1913–14 was only fourteen, and not all sought employment in South West Africa. 32. Wildenthal, “Colonizers and Citizens,” 223–25; see Rommel and Rautenberg, Die kolonialen Frauenschulen, 19–20. 33. DKG 607, 182-83 Sprandel forwarded Mecklenburg Falkenhausen’s remarks from 29 May 1913 on the League’s sabotage efforts. 34. Quoted from a letter Lydia Stillhammer, Gaikeissa, to Helene von Falkenhausen, 26 Jan. 1913 (Abschrift), DKG 607, 118-20; also H. Reinhardt, Brakwater, to Sprandel, Cassel, 22 June, 1913 describes a Swakopmund hotel owner who advised arriving women against going to the Home Farm. 35. DKG 607, 168-71, quoted from Falkenhausen to Sprandel, Cassel, 22 June. 1913 (Abschrift). 36. “Die Tagung des Frauenbundes der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft in Berlin,” KH 6, no. 39 (1912–13): 9–10; Abteilung Lüderitzbucht des Frauenbundes der Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft,” LZ 5, no. 6 (7 Feb. 1913); Venghiattis, “Mobilizing,” 227–29. 37. DKG 607, 103, quote from Abschrift, Thekla Dressel, Brakwater, to Sprandel, Stuttgart, 5 Dec. 1913. 38. Lynn Abrams, “Concubinage, Cohabitation and the Law: Class and Gender Relations in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Gender and History 5, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 88. 39. DKG 156, 108, quote from Mecklenburg, Blankenburg, to Hedwig Heyl, Berlin, 16 Aug. 1913, 105, Heyl’s agreement to Mecklenburg, 22 Aug. 1913, and 33, Heyl to the German Colonial Society, 18 Nov. 1913 insisted the league vetted 2,000 to 3,000 annual applicants and selected its maids with “extraordinarily extensive and careful work.” 40. DKG 609, 11-16, Altona Chapter of the league to President Mecklenburg (n.d. July 1914), and Sprandel, Stuttgart, to Mecklenburg, 15 July 1914, Sprandel made the dismaying discovery that the candidate in question was indeed a former psychiatric patient who had hidden

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41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

53. 54.

55.

56. 57.

58.

her past on her application. Sprandel drew the broad and self-serving conclusion from the incident that working-class servants should no longer benefit from the sponsored settlement program: “We would never have had such unhappy experiences with genteel girls.” (12). DKG 608, 100, quote from Abschrift, Ida Gerardin, Swakopmund, to Frau Sprandel, 8 July 1913. DKG 156, 108, Mecklenburg, Blankenburg, to Hedwig Heyl, Berlin, 16 Aug. 1913, and DSWA, L.II.k.1, Bd. 2, 128, Secretary von Hatten to the Colonial Government in Windhoek, 17 Feb. 1914 requesting that due to complaints about the exposure of private information that maids’ papers be kept in envelopes. DKG 178, 304, Winkler to Karl Liebig, Billerbeck i. W., 17 Feb. 1913. See also DKG 156, 217, dated 7 Mar. 1913. DKG 607, 121, E. Schirmer, Swakopmund, to Helene von Falkenhausen, 21 Feb. 1913, Abschrift. DKG 609, 23 reverse-24, Hedwig S., emigrant number 1982, Falkenhausen to Sprandel, 3 Apr. 1914 (Abschrift). DKG 156, 40, Mecklenburg to Heyl, 14 Nov. 1913.; DKG 607, 15-18, Executive Vice President Freiherr Georg Gayl to Governor Seitz, 15 Nov. 1913, and to Sprandel, same date, 609, 55 and 56; Falkenhausen to Colonial Society, 4 Mar. 1914, and 11 Mar. 1914, DKG 609, 6165, Seitz and Voigt’s reports, Feb. and Mar. 1914; 54 and 46 describe the Brakwater farm. Anon., “Die ‘Damen’ des Heimathauses. (Eingesandt),” LZ 6, no. 30 (July 24, 1914). Eine für viele, “Die ‘Damen’ des Heimathauses. Eine Erwiderung.” LZ 6, no. 32 (7 Aug. 1914). DKG 159, 344, 324, 311-12, 305, 297, 262, 246, discuss Hulda K. On the Colonial Society’s demand for certification, 265. In more than one instance, administrators dismissed maids’ charges of mistreatment or bad working conditions. (See, for example, DSWA, L.II.k.2, Bd.1, 30.) DSWA, L.II.k.1, Bd. 2, 62, Heyl lists several maids’ grievances in a letter to Governor Seitz from 6 May 1911 and, 14, dated 19 July 1911, Deputy Governor Hintrager explained, the league must handle its own employment disputes. DSWA, L.II.k.2, Bd. 3, Bl. 186-96, including newspaper clipping, “Notstandsarbeiter, ein Städtischer Notstand,” DSWAZ 2tes Blatt 16, no. 140 (24 Dec. 1913). Anna Winter, Neubrandenburg, to President Mecklenburg, Braunschweig, 22 June 1913, DKG 159, 285 complaints about employer and matron; Paula F., emigrant number 1781discussed in NAN, BKE 9, Kp-95-235 B. 10.M, 33-35. Quote from Teacher H. to Keetmanshoop district officer, 16 Mar. 1914. His remarks may indicate his in-law was slandering his reputation, or others; the allegations of hysteria bear similarity to the sponsored migrant I.L. in Fumani, “A German Whore and No Money at That.” DKG 194, 286, quoted from Winkler, Berlin, to Kannegießer, Windhoek, 30 Mar. 1912. DKG 194, 246, Abschrift, Kannegießer, Windhoek, to Winkler, Berlin, 19 June 1912. The home provided low-cost child care and a medical clinic to the poor and infirm who otherwise would fall to the expense of the local parish: “Kindergarten,” Keetmanshooper Nachrichten no. 242 (21 Mar. 1911). DKG 194, 246-47, Abschrift, Kannegießer, Windhoek, to Winkler, Berlin, 19 June 1912. Quote, 247; DKG 194, 244, Missionary C[arl] Wandres to Dr. Kannegießer, original, forwarded to Colonial Society, “Marked confidential (Vertraulich!), (forwarded 19 June 1912) corroborated the account. DKG 194, 153, Winkler, Berlin to Dr. Kannegießer, Windhoek, 24 Feb. 1913. Gayl in “Die Tätigkeit des Frauenbundes,” KH 6, no. 7 (1913), 8, and Hatten in “Frauenbund der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft, DSWAZ 16, no. 79 sought to downplay the gossip about the dormitory. Speculation that recently there were fewer offers of marriage to Homeland House residents found in “Für das Heimathaus,” LZ 4, no. 19 (11 May 1912), Drittes Blatt. DKG 194, 153, 24, Feb. 1913 Winkler to Dr. Kannegießer, Windhoek.

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59. DKG 159, 458, 464-65, 444, correspondence between the League and Colonial Society, Berlin, 11 to 16 Mar. 1912. Quoted from Mecklenburg to the Women’s League, 11 Mar. 1912, 465. 60. Pierard, “German Colonial Society,” 253. 61. DKG 156, 433-35, Colonial Society delegate to the League, Dr. Schulte im Hofe, to Mecklenburg 10 Apr. 1912. 62. DKG 156, 433-35, 426-28, 419, 381-82, League and Colonial Society correspondence, 10 Apr. to 16 July 1912, regarding placement fees. On requiring repayment, see DKG 156, 110, 14 Aug. 1913, Colonial Society secretary Winkler, Berlin, to the league. 63. DKG 156, 383-84, 410, 419, 426-28, 464 between the Colonial Society and the Women’s League concerning servants’ return fares. 64. DSWA, L.II.m.1.,125, Mecklenburg, Braunschweig, 12 Jan. 1913 request for information from Southwest African administration. 65. DSWA, L.II.k.2.Bd. 4., 18 and 20, District Officer Heiligenbrunner, Keetmanshoop, 15 May 1914, to colonial government in Windhoek; Hintrager, Windhoek, June 2 1914, to State Secretary of the RKA, Berlin, Betrifft Bedarf an weiblichen Dienstboten. 66. DSWA. L.II.m.1.,125, 12 Jan. 1913 and response with completed report, DKG 182, 1, Governor’s office in Windhoek, 6 Mar. 1914. 67. DSWA, L.II.k.2, Bd. 4, 20, Governor’s Office, report to the Colonial Secretary, 2 June 1914 regarding the continued need for maids’ immigration.

 Part III

German Women’s Colonialism after the Loss of the German Colonies

  CHAPTER 7

German Colonial Women in World War I

The sudden outbreak of World War I in late July 1914 threatened all German international traffic, including shipping and mail between Germany and its colonies. German steamship lines immediately ceased operations on 1 August to avoid potential capture or destruction by hostile forces, freezing travel, imports, and the post. Germans could communicate with most of the outside world only through letters via a neutral nation. In addition, the British also controlled the global underseas cables, so the Central Powers, which included Germany, lost not only direct access to international telegram traffic, but also overseas money transfers and global news services. British military strategists also identified radio as the only major alternative mode of communication, immediately targeting the array of German radio towers connecting the homeland and overseas colonies as possible threats, along with Germany’s global naval installations, since radio communications might enable Berlin to coordinate with German vessels in the colonies to threaten Entente shipping or their imperial settlements in Africa, Asia, or the Pacific Islands.1 In the first weeks of the war, forces from neighboring Belgian, British, and French colonies in Africa began focused assaults on colonial German radio towers, including the chief transmitter in Kamina, Togo. German officials were under orders to destroy that tower if it was threatened, and duly detonated it on 26 August 1914. The loss imposed a state of irregular and one-way radio transmission only from Germany to its territories in Cameroon, East Africa, South West Africa, and Togo. With communications interrupted, Entente forces in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific soon raced into action, seeking to conquer German territories before rivals could steal these prizes. Vulnerable and stranded German settlements and naval installations, whose dependence on imports impaired their likelihood of withstanding sieges, offered attractive targets for expansionistic ambitions of Australia and Japan

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in China and the Pacific. Likewise, Belgian, British, and French, and even nominally neutral Portuguese colonies soon began eyeing neighboring German territories in Africa for possible acquisition. On 7 August 1914 the British imperial government requested that South Africa seize South West African harbors and wireless stations. The prime minister, General Louis Botha, an Afrikaner, envisioned a broader war with South West Africa as a potential means of fostering greater unity between former enemy South African populations of Afrikaners and English settlers. Botha and Minister of Defense Jan Smuts soon began hatching plans for invasion. Although the South African Assembly did not ratify the decision to attack South West Africa until 10 September, by late August South African troops were already amassing for a three-pronged invasion, on the South African land borders at Port Nolloth on the Atlantic Coast, at Upington on the Orange River, and for a marine landing through the South West African port at Lüderitzbucht.2 Although South Africa’s invasion of South West Africa frightened German settlers, many Germans articulated a surpassing fear that the territory’s African population would take advantage of the colonial military’s engagement to rape and slaughter German settler families. The German handling of the African population in the war therefore focused on their containment as internal enemies. For instance, Governor Theodore Seitz enacted policies of removal of the Bondelswarts to Ovamboland, which was then suffering from severe drought and famine, which compounded the situation. In his postwar memoir, Seitz depicted the entire region of South Africa as a region caught in an “increasingly bitter race war,” in which Africans were prepared to take advantage of the conflict between the two colonial powers.3 As the narrative makes clear, other German accounts also capture a sense of collective paranoia, even retraumatization, as the invasion caused them to revisit memories of the African attacks on settlers in the wars of 1904. German settlers’ experiences of the war could not be shared with the homeland, due to the outbreak of war and the shipping standstill. The embargo on shipping, travel, and communication also immediately halted the efforts of the German Colonial Society and its Women’s League to promote overseas settlement. The loss of contact with the German overseas empire in Africa obstructed the league’s mission to promote the colonization and welfare of German settlers and, eventually forced the organization to legitimate its very existence. As the war unfolded, Germany initially won territorial gains in Eastern Europe that helped distract the German public from the losses of nearly all of its overseas empire. (Entente forces chiefly from Britain and its colonies, including India and South Africa, occupied the territory of German East Africa and interned much of its German settler population, but a cadre of German and African forces under the command of Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck eluded and harried much larger enemy numbers, heartening a war-wearied German public in the homeland by surrendering only after the armistice on 14 November 1918.)4 As the war ground on, however, Germans in the homeland witnessed the nation’s mounting war casualties, while the Entente’s

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trade embargo and mining of the North Sea blocked Germany’s imports and increasingly inflicted hunger and hardship on the home front, contributing mightily to Germany’s eventual collapse and defeat. As this chapter details, none of these obstacles deterred the league’s ardent colonialists from their patriotic support for the war or their public agitation on behalf of the German colonies and their settlers. Instead, during the four years of conflict the league evolved to face the increasingly dire developments threatening the German colonies and the welfare of German colonists: at first, the organization focused on rescuing a number of their sponsored female settlers who had been marooned mid-transit to South West Africa, as well as on aiding displaced colonial travelers stranded in Germany by the war. As the German colonies resisted Entente invasions, the league publicized and protested enemy powers’ allegedly unprovoked incursions and raised funds to ameliorate the losses and hardships of German colonists. Once Germany’s overseas possessions fell to military occupation, the league worked with German colonial officials and other private organizations to provide funds and assistance to colonial Germans, including seeking restitution for their property losses, rebuilding overseas settlements, and agitating for the restoration of German overseas territories to Germany. In the final stages of the war and the early armistice, the league also was forced to recalibrate its identity following street unrest, the collapse of the kaiser’s rule, the humiliation of defeat, and establishment of the Weimar Republic, while spearheading popular opposition to the permanent loss of the German overseas empire, which became League of Nations’ mandates in the final peace settlement. As this chapter outlines, during each of the successive stages in World War I in Africa, the league revised its organizational mission and goals, reformulating its reasons why Germany still needed it and modifying its program and operations to meet each new threat to the future of the German colonial empire. As the war progressed, Germans in the homeland increasingly strained to provide charity to the colonies as they faced growing hardships and gradually confronted their inevitable defeat. The colonial women’s movement adapted to the evolving challenges and privations within Germany itself. The league and numerous other German women’s clubs banded together at the start of the conflict to support the homeland’s war effort, forming the Nationaler Frauendienst, or NFD (National War Service), an umbrella organization designed to coordinate German women’s contributions to the war. Through the NFD, female members from local chapters of various private women’s groups cooperated to address the demands of the home front arising from the war in cities and districts throughout Germany. This “weibliche Heimarmee (female home army),” as German empress Victoria-Augusta labeled them, primarily assisted in managing the rationing of provisions, caring for families facing hardship caused by the war, and mobilizing women’s employment in war industries to replace male workers for military service. The NFD was active between 1 August 1914 until 1 November 1916, when the Ger-

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man War Office was established, with a women’s division in its own bureaucracy to fulfill these functions.5 As a participating organization in the NFD, the league was forced to balance its primary mission to provide for the needs of the German colonists with general war work on behalf of the entire country. Throughout the years of war and armistice, from 1914 through 1919, the league not only supported the homeland’s war effort, but also fought to retain its organizational identity, membership, financial resources, and even its relevance, since Germany was cut off from its overseas empire, until it faced a future without colonies altogether.

“Painful Ignorance”: Loss of Contact between Homeland and Colonies The history of German women’s colonial activism during the war lacks a solid archival source base in part because of the communication blackout. Without reliable contact, the league could do little for Germans overseas. In addition, because the league and Colonial Society no longer needed to coordinate their efforts to assist women’s colonial passages, the Colonial Society’s archival holdings, which comprise the source base for much of this study, contain few internal documents from the league after 1914. A few of the Colonial Society’s records do help to put a human face on the earliest disruptions caused by outbreak of the war, detailing a few dozen cases where prospective emigrant wives, brides, and children were unable to reunite with or contact family members abroad. For example, Wilhelm Bormann, a railroad station worker in Windhoek, had urgently requested travel assistance for his daughter Emma and his bride Metta Killat, residing in Dortmond, who were scheduled to embark for South West Africa on 11 August 1914. Bormann revealed that his first wife had died in Germany in 1912, leaving his four-year-old daughter Emma motherless there. “First and foremost in the interest of my child, and to provide any kind of home for my child at all, I must remarry.”6 Bormann’s difficult situation suggests that the long, forced wartime separations exacted heavy financial and emotional tolls on colonial families. A few unfortunate sponsored women emigrants even were marooned en route to the colonies. A group of nine league emigrants set sail on 26 July 1914, as did a few individual migrants on Colonial Society travel stipends, including Julie Sauter, the thirty-five-year-old Alsatian bride of farmer George Moritz Stillger in Bethanien. Sauter suddenly found herself among a group of German women stranded in the port of Tenerife, in the Spanish Canary Islands, off the Western coast of Africa. Their steamship was unable to proceed safely once the war erupted. A dozen or so immigrant women were left high and dry for three months until the Colonial Society was able to arrange their safe and costly return passage to Germany through

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the neutral Italian port of Genoa. On 7 August the Colonial Society also notified about twenty additional prospective emigrants that their plans were on hold since all shipping was halted until further notice, but there was no certain way for them to inform loved ones in the colony of their delay.7 It is unknown whether the separated families depicted within the archival files ever reunited or whether these parted couples ever married. Another letter from the archives captures the natural fears that many a German in the homeland with family members in the colonies suffered during the communications blackout. The following inquiry arrived February 1915 from Frau Tony Haun of Essen, who was frantically seeking information about the whereabouts of her adult daughter, Anna Haun, a middle-class woman whom the league had assisted in settling in South West Africa. In April 1914 Anna had embarked from Germany for the port of Lüderitzbucht, where she expected to assume a position as governess and bookkeeper, but she soon discovered that she was no longer needed. In her final letter to her mother in Germany before the war, Anna had debated whether to stay in Lüderitzbucht or to accept a position available near Windhoek. Her mother worried that she might have been one of several hundred women and children taken captive during the war, a fate shared by thousands of Germans civilians outside the homeland: “All connection is probably impossible, since all communication has been cut off. If it were possible for you to find out from your connections what the situation is there for people of our country, I would be infinitely grateful . . . as I have lived for six months in tormented uncertainty about my only child.”8 Haun’s desperate plea for news about the fate of her beloved daughter during the war, like many others, would remain unanswered. As one servant recruited by the league in South West Africa wrote, “Now, suddenly we are cut off from the world. What could you have thought about where we were, or if we were even alive at all? I have only just had my first news from you; I was extremely worried, too. If my letter should reach you, write to me immediately and in detail, but avoid anything political. Do not write about the war, or it won’t be forwarded [past the censors].”9 Her words echo the sentiments of many of the several hundred thousand civilians from belligerent and neutral nations who faced enemy occupation, internment, or deportation during the war. Germans themselves interned British missionaries and colonists in East Africa early in the war; scholars claim the white prisoners in Africa found this situation especially difficult because it demeaned them in the eyes of the local Africans. In many instances the International Red Cross facilitated communication between internees and their families, but did not inspect the internment camps for South West African women.10 The extended loss of contact made German families with loved ones in the colonies or interned incommunicado atypical from those without: World War I was unlike most previous wars in that contact between the European front and homeland was regular. Historians of the war in Germany have detailed the millions of letters and packages exchanged weekly between German service personnel at

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the front and their families, suggesting these missives helped give the German home front an understanding of the conflict, and that information from an official telegram or an inquiry with the Red Cross often could yield certainty about a loved one’s death on the European front, unlike the colonial theaters. Historians point out that German wives and family members awaiting news underwent enormous stress, but it is an open question whether it was more stressful to have no possibility of news at all or to suffer pangs of anxiety when a service member in the family suddenly ceased to communicate for unknown reasons. Families in Germany were relatively safe, while German colonists faced a far more uncertain future against imminent invasion with overwhelming odds stacked against them. Scholars also detail the German homeland’s invention of rumors about food or the war situation where reliable information was lacking, especially as conditions on the home front deteriorated.11 These were present in German South West Africa from the earliest days of the war, and ended before many Germans felt the worst hardships. Indeed, Germans in South West Africa were able to repatriate after 1915 only to experience hunger and privation again in Germany, even more intensely. Not only were Germans in the colony cut off from the German homeland, but they were also cut off from the maternal philanthropy of the league and the military protection of the fatherland. Germans in the colonies were unaccustomed to fending for themselves, but were well accustomed to resorting to rumors in the face of uncertainty, as previous chapters have detailed. The wartime news blackout, the loss of contact with loved ones overseas or even in other parts of the territory, and the danger of invasion expanded the power of rumor to new heights in South West Africa from the very beginning of the conflict.12 Meanwhile, if not for the league’s publicity, Germans at home without ties to the colonies likely would have given them little thought. The league sought to reverse Germans’ distraction from colonial affairs as it sought to help meet the material needs of those closer to home: dozens of residents from the colonies who had been stranded in Germany by the war, including a large percentage who were homeless and destitute. Because they had no permanent residence in Germany, these refugees were not eligible for state assistance, at least according to newsletter accounts. Working in partnership, the league and German Colonial Society immediately founded a Colonial Aid Committee, offering support in the form of stipends, clothing, shelter, and loans to more than displaced 140 ex-colonial families who had applied in the first three months of the war alone. Local chapters also adopted the colonial refugees in their communities, combining 20  percent of their treasuries with supplemental funds from the NFD to donate food, shelter, and winter clothing to these impoverished German women and children, as a patriotic wartime duty. To raise funds for these war efforts as well as toward future expenses to rebuild the postwar colonies, the league produced a pamphlet in the first months of the conflict that equated the public service of colonial interests with true German patriotism: “Despite the war confusion in our times, clearer and

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brighter than ever, however, the consciousness is rising within us all of the necessity of a colonial Germany. The future of Germandom is dependent on paving the way for this realization among the entire German Volk. Women of Germany, help work for our colonies. We must preserve them, and when the hour of peace strikes, we must devote all our strength to promoting their economic interests. Help, all you German women, to advance the patriotic work of the Women’s League!”13 Even quite early in the war, the league may have found the broader public unresponsive to their claim that displaced German colonists were suffering en masse for the German Empire, given the many other patriotic causes competing for Germans’ charitable donations, the context of a complete news blackout about the colonies, and the historical sparseness of German colonial settlement, which meant that the vast majority of Germans had no direct ties to the colonies. Local organizations even resented when national organizations drew donations from outlying districts of Germany to Berlin. How much more difficult was it for the league’s appeals to establish the German colonists as worthy objects of public charity?14 Despite these obstacles, members continued to donate to their war aid chest, and the league national announced collections had reached just shy of 5,000 marks by early October 1914. More significantly, the league had access to its existing coffers to fund its war work. Redirecting the financial allocations from the German Colonial Society to subsidize servant women’s emigration, the Berlin headquarters of the Women’s League also began to serve lunchtime meals—not only to displaced colonists, but also to other needy citizens of genteel origins, particularly refugees and the unemployed. Seventy league members volunteered in the operation of the NFDaffiliated soup kitchen in the months between August 1914 and July 1915, serving two hundred twenty thousand portions to between six hundred to seven hundred regular visitors each day, with the help of clubwomen from other Berlin women’s organizations.15 The organization’s emphasis on helping distressed middle-class clients withheld its assistance to many of the most impoverished Germans. Meanwhile, individual chapters in various cities and regions throughout Germany worked independently, while others fell under direction of the NFD, or the leadership of local Red Cross or Patriotic Women’s League chapters, engaging in a variety of other war efforts such as outfitting military hospitals and operating child-care facilities for women in war industries. Local chapters of the league also devoted themselves to any number of smaller drives and initiatives, such as the clubwomen in Giessen, who collected reading materials for soldiers in deployment and for field hospitals. The June 1915 annual account of the previous year’s activities noted that the usual yearly questionnaire on the status of their sponsored migrants would be interrupted during the conflict; although some private reports indicated their well-being, no word from the Homeland House had reached them since the previous July.16 By July 1915 the colony was no longer in German hands. Although the military history of the war in Africa is well-documented, this chapter briefly explores life in the doomed colony. It details German colonists’

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experiences of the war in South West Africa, highlighting those of civilians, whose stories have not been fully explored. The narrative seeks to capture the fear and uncertainty of civilians during the colonial invasion and its aftermath, particularly in light of the preexisting sexual and racial anxieties among Germans in South West Africa. The narrative is based in part on colonial newspapers and a few published war memoirs and diaries. German residents in the territory soon felt the direct impact of the outbreak of war, correctly fearing the aggression of their powerful neighbors in the Union of South Africa, which had a population of about 1.5 million. The South West African forces, with only 1,800 regular troops and perhaps another 3,500 conscripts, had little chance of victory against the roughly sixteen thousand South African troops that eventually invaded with a body of forty-three thousand additional personnel in support positions.17 The scale of fighting in South West Africa was on a vastly different order than the millions who fought and died in Europe. Military casualties were slight; only 113 Germans died in combat and 153 died from disease and accident, while 263 were wounded. The war culminated in a long campaign of six months of steady German retreats, with 899 Germans eventually taken prisoner of war. Germans back home could not follow events as they took place in the colony, nor did the inevitable defeat lend itself to glorious retelling in later years. Indeed, available evidence indicates that the very lack of contact with Germany helped frame the South West African settlers’ experience of the war; without reliable news and collective material support from colonialist societies in the homeland, the war emergency exacerbated social conflicts in the colony and underscored the power of gossip and rumors within the German community there.

The South West African Front The following sketch of civilian life in the first months of World War I in South West Africa makes use of the German South West African Newspaper (Swakopmund), The Lüderitzbucht Newspaper, and Southwest (Windhoek). One by one, each of these papers ceased publication as the invasion proceeded. In general, the colonial press typically responded to the lack of official information about the war in South West Africa by limiting coverage about local news and republishing excerpts from old British newspapers and other filler, concentrating most of their coverage toward the European war fronts. Memoirist H.W. Kaufmann complained that the Southwest Herald and Southwest simply reprinted “fabricated British lies,” suggesting that colonists now further doubted the newspapers’ contents.18 Newspapers had little alternative to republishing material from the enemy; the 18 September edition of the Lüderitzbucht Newspaper apologized for the lack of new information with the excuse that most of its former staff were now enlisted. Newspapers also faced other problems; they sometimes suspended delivery due to lack

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of personnel and a shortage of draft animals, and they published irregularly. The poor quality of the paper and ink now makes some issues illegible. Given these limitations, it has not been possible to determine whether the available newspaper collections are complete. Colonial newspapers first reported the war on 2 August 1914 and announced as a precaution that the administration was calling up all able-bodied men in the army reserve on 7 August, but farmers with grain or potato crops were excused from service as indispensable workers. Immediately after the declaration of war in Europe, and England’s belated entry on 5 August, it was not yet clear if war would spread to the overseas colonies. In general, the first wartime issues reflect early efforts to build colonial solidarity that drew men and women in aid of the German homeland, including a special prayer service in Swakopmund, a public telegram of support to the kaiser from the townsfolk of Gobabis, and fundraising appeals for the German Red Cross from the women of Okahandja and from area district administrators. In Maltahöhe the settlers collected 2,000 marks for the Red Cross in only a few hours. A ceremonial send-off for the troops took place on the evening of 6 August with patriotic anthems and flag-waving. Despite the uncertainty about the colony’s position in the war, the disruption to shipping from the continent alone was cause for concern. Governor Theodor Seitz’s office announced the removal of all food stores and other vital commodities inland from vulnerable coastal areas and the relaxation of toll procedures for imports to ease their transit, but sought to reassure settlers that a food shortage was unlikely thanks to the probability that the war in Europe would be of short duration. Nonetheless, the Felsenkeller Brewery in Windhoek immediately advertised deliveries on a cash basis only, refusing to extend credit.19 The German South West African Newspaper provides by far the best evidence of some of the wild rumors circulating among settlers from the very beginning of the conflict. Its pages also most openly address the underlying tensions between whites in the colony, as the situation deteriorated. Governor Seitz’s administration sought to reassure the colonial public that regular news updates would be forthcoming, but local newspapers undermined his intended message by couching it amid dire warnings: “There is no basis for any fear in the colony. On this occasion, however, we would not want to omit the warning to everyone during such earnest times as these that one needs to take care and secure one’s weapons and munitions lest they fall into unwanted hands [presumably referring to marauding Africans].”20 Reassurances such as these were more likely to increase the spread of colonists’ fearful rumors than to reassure anyone, and it is clear that the governor’s efforts could not fully staunch their anxieties. The German South West African Newspaper remarked on “the silliest and most ridiculous stories being spread and believed” in the city of Swakopmund, where it was printed. Among the tall tales was the alleged appearance of a warship at anchor off its harbor and false reports of the evacuation of Lüderitzbucht and Swakop-

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Figure 7.1. “Kuibis: Damenschützenverein beim Übungsschießen 1910” (“Kuibis Ladies’ Rifle Club during Shooting Practice, 1910”). https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/ kolonialesbildarchiv/content/titleinfo/11359918 Courtesy of the Colonial Picture Archive, Goethe University Frankfurt/Main Library: urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-823025.

mund on the governor’s orders. (In hindsight, these tales seem prophetic.) The rumored closure of harbor public works added to municipal concerns, since more than four hundred whites and uncounted Africans already were unemployed in Lüderitzbucht. White looters reportedly sacked the henhouse of the Prince Bismarck Hotel, perhaps incited by the climate of fear or by hunger. The editors firmly advised readers to stop voicing complaints about the sudden freshness of Africans: “Instead of palavering about the unruliness of the natives, one should bring the offender to the police, who soon will take care that any incipient attempts at rebellion are nipped in the bud.”21 Not long after, Swakopmund district officer Todt issued a curfew order for Africans to remain in the city werft between 9 p.m. and 4 a.m., unless they were carrying the written permission of their employers.22 The period between the start of war in Europe and the start of fighting in the South West African theater established a dangerous economic climate in which food prices rose precipitously and businesses laid off workers, both white and black. Unemployment presented a brief but serious security issue to administrators in the cities for the short term, although soon thereafter war mobilization absorbed most white men as soldiers and thousands of blacks as servants and drov-

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ers. In addition to the local measures such as curfews, Governor Theodor Seitz, at the helm of the central colonial government, gradually expanded the state’s war powers toward the management of precious resources, especially where there was the danger of serious unrest. Officials’ actions included not only the mobilization of all able-bodied men and the requisition of necessary draft animals, but also the establishment of promissory scrip to pay troops and meet state expenses.23 A number of colonial charitable efforts began to shift their focus to assisting settlers in need once the local mobilization took hold, as contact with the homeland remained cut off—the Women’s Red Cross Association for the Colonies called for white women to volunteer as nurses or housekeepers to serve in field hospitals. Previously, the organization had directed its efforts to collect funds to support the care of wounded German soldiers in the European fronts. However, its Swakopmund chapter and the city’s newspaper called for thousands of marks in donations for the German Red Cross to be redirected to assist needy women and children in their own localities: “We in Swakopmund particularly have often enough shown that we always keep an open hand to give happily and richly to national causes— one may think of our support to the fleet. Therefore, we presently have good right, no, even more the duty to think first of the present need of women and children in Southwest [Africa] who are unemployed and without means.” Likewise, the newspaper praised the offer of a local nursing home to open its kitchen space for use by the community to help conserve fuel, as well as announcement that a local doctor would be offering a first aid course to train volunteer nurses and medics of both sexes in the city.24 There were ominous signs that, despite these efforts at private philanthropy, the existing safety net could not fully meet the crisis until Governor Seitz again assumed the unprecedented authority to order the requisition of all foodstuffs in the colony at prewar prices for public rationing. By late August most of the scant news came from South African news sources, but described a series of promising German victories in Europe, with little signal of enemy intentions toward South West Africa. In the words of the local paper, “life is proceeding in its usual peaceful way.” Although some businesses had shuttered, farmers continued their work and some farmers even tended cattle for their neighbors who were called to military service. Schools prepared to open. The railway resumed limited service.25 Unbeknownst to the South West African colonists going about their daily affairs, invasion was looming. The 1920 memoirs of Governor Seitz make clear that his administration’s colonial war preparations were wholly inadequate, particularly in terms of ensuring the local food supply. He estimated that there were perhaps enough provisions for three to five months available at the start of the conflict, and regretted that African natives had accustomed themselves to Western fare and could not easily return to their traditional diet of hunting and gathering to sustain them (conveniently forgetting that postrebellion German ordinances forbade traditional Herero cattle herding). In October Seitz’s administration prohibited the

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private sale of food. He further relates that state rations were exhausted by February 1915 and gauges that the failed harvest caused thirty thousand Africans in the Northern Territory to starve following the South African invasion, despite his pleas that the South African invaders come to their assistance.26 Early in the war the Southwest issued a brief special edition quoting the head of the protectorate forces: “Our patrolling officers on our [Orange River] borders confirm that the English are arming the Bastards and Hottentots! [derogatory]”27 German schoolteacher Cissy Willich and other contemporaries referred to the arming of Africans in war as a “crime against the white race!” However, historical accounts underscore that both sides viewed the conflict as a white man’s war, although tens of thousands of Africans served both armies in unarmed support positions, including wagon-drivers, cattle-drovers, grooms for horses and mules, and servants, suggesting this was yet another case of false speculation in the newspapers.28

The First Salvos With the mass of German troops concentrated around Windhoek in the colony’s center, the port cities remained largely undefended, apart from local civil watches. War started abruptly; even as territorial German newspapers remained cautiously optimistic that Afrikaners from the Union of South Africa would not support an invasion of South West Africa. The first skirmishes took place on 12 September 1914, when a small South African war party crossed into the southern border of South West Africa near Uhabis-Holoog. On 15 September a small garrison, including three whites, staffing the far southern outpost at Ramansdrift, were forced to withdraw in the face of invading forces. However, these actions were far from large white settlements in the colony. Much more dramatically, the city of Swakopmund came under fire by an enemy warship (actually a merchant ship converted for military service) on 14 September 1914.29 The German South West African Newspaper described the shelling in Swakopmund at length. The 13,000-ton British cruiser HMS Armadale Castle fired a barrage of seventeen 12.4-cm grenade shells at the radio tower in the harbor of Swakopmund, beginning at 2:05 p.m. on Monday 14 September 1914. A few shells landed harmlessly in the massive sand dunes outside the city. Some of the artillery that missed its target hit several nearby houses, but inflicted no serious casualties. Although at least one house was shelled, the only recorded death from the attack on Swakopmund was an unfortunate cow.30 The mayor scolded the captain of the Armadale Castle for endangering civilians unnecessarily, since the radio had not been operational for some time. The ship set sail from the harbor soon thereafter. The newspaper account related that, in the wake of the disturbance, “Women of the city, in particular, found the uproar immensely unsettling and sought and found refuge and soothing comfort from the

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Antonius Hospital, which stands under the protection of the Red Cross flag.” A number of German women and children also evacuated the coastal city for the colony’s interior in the days following the bombardment. Kaufmann’s diary estimates the number was as high as four hundred to five hundred. The British, incited by a South West African assault on the nearby South African coastal enclave of Walvis Bay, carried out another naval bombardment on 24 September that resulted in the destruction of the landing bridges in the harbor at Swakopmund, but did not yet unleash troops in the city.31 The other major port city, Lüderitzbucht, fell victim first instead. On 19 September about two thousand invading South African troops landed at the port, where about five hundred civilians remained. On 20 September the occupiers proclaimed the city was occupied and civilians disarmed. The British occupiers evicted indignant local nurses and patients from the city hospital, who then transformed the league’s Youth Home into a makeshift clinic. On 22 September South African forces in control of the city ordered all German and Austrian men and their dependents to prepare for travel, to be sent to the Roberts Heights prisoner of war camp near Pretoria, where South African Germans were also interned. (Records confirm a number of noncombatant Scandinavians and other nationalities inadvertently fell into their net as well.) South African forces removed the remaining unmarried or unaccompanied white women and children from Lüderitzbucht and its surrounds, and housed them in a separate women’s camp in Pietermaritzburg (Natal) South Africa. Germans feared for their well-being, recalling that the notorious conditions at South African internment camps during the second Afrikaner war had resulted in the mass deaths of Afrikaner women and children.32 The list of internees in the Pietermaritzburg women’s refugee camp alone contains 470 names. German officials first obtained and published the list of captives in March 1915. One internee described the drafty cabins at the so-called FräuleinKamp or Amazonen-Kamp as uncomfortably chilly. Fräulein Anna Wehlmann, chapter head of the league in the city of Lüderitzbucht and former headmistress of its Youth Home, began conducting her usual girls’ handicraft lessons for the schoolchildren in the camp. She attempted to provide a structured kindergarten, but she closed it after four days due to inclement weather and lack of heat. She noted that some of the unmarried women had taken positions with local German families in South Africa, and two had found marriage partners. A number of Germans voiced indignation at their internment, although life was not easy for the remaining civilians in the colony.33

“Relentless War” Meanwhile, a serious but short-lived Afrikaner rebellion had erupted on 15 September, which caused months of delay to the full invasion. The Afrikaner uprising

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consisted of a coup of thirty thousand Afrikaners from the Union of South Africa led by half a dozen senior officers against Botha’s command, the majority of whom resigned their commissions protesting the invasion of South West Africa. In addition to misgivings against supporting British colonial policies, they were particularly opposed to fighting Afrikaner residents of South West Africa, who numbered about 1,600 and provided about one hundred soldiers. Historians do not believe the Germans took an active role in provoking the Afrikaner rebellion, although they welcomed it. Smuts responded to the wave of Afrikaner resistance on 11 October by declaring martial law, with compulsory military service, dividing the Afrikaners into camps of those who participated in the uprising, and those who sought to suppress it. In various skirmishes Afrikaners on both sides lost just over a hundred men in the conflict, with about twice that number in casualties. The standoff ended in the rebels’ surrender on 24 January 1915. Botha offered clemency to most of them, trying only the leaders and executing the one officer who had not resigned his commission. While disastrous for Afrikaner unity and Botha’s future political standing, the rebellion merely forestalled the full invasion of South West Africa until January 1915, by which time there were seventy thousand South African troops in uniform, far in excess of those needed for the invasion.34 Unaware that the South African attack had ground to a halt, in the wake of the unsettling events in Lüderitzbucht and Swakopmund noncombatant German settlers began to evacuate the coast in greater numbers. Diarist Cissy Willich in Okahandja recorded that, following the second enemy bombardment of Swakopmund, on 26 September an overfilled train of women and children evacuees arrived at midnight. She noted that these refugees had witnessed the grim sight of the first large number of combat casualties being removed by train from the Battle of Sandfontein, the only significant German victory in the conflict. The newspaper Southwest reported that the city of Swakopmund had been nearly abandoned, and its denizens dispersed throughout the other northern and central towns and cities. It editorialized, “The majority of the . . . unfortunate residents of Swakopmund find themselves here. It is self-evidently the duty of our fellow Windhoek citizens to ease the lives of those driven here from their own hearths and homes by the relentless war as much as possible.”35 There was limited housing and other resources to assist so many refugees The constant waves of refugees posed a growing problem for the city government. Willich herself withdrew to the capital in early October, remarking that the city voiced a more serious tone about the war than in the countryside. The Windhoek newspaper called on citizens with extra rooms to register voluntarily with the government to provide lodging for evacuees. Kaufmann notes that schools and other public buildings in Karibib and Windhoek were converted to makeshift, very uncomfortable housing. Additionally, a circular from the Windhoek mayor urged residents to help German servant women without employment, “Since foreseeably in the near future there will be many unemployed young maids, the city adminis-

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tration will assist in sheltering them. Those citizens of Windhoek who are prepared to employ them as helps, etc., without recompense (apart from food and lodging), should notify the municipal authorities.”36 His special provisions for female servants suggests that unmarried German women of the working classes faced particular hardships during the invasion. However, only about five women applied for assistance to the Homeland House, and its matron soon placed them all with employment. Unfortunately, the suddenness of the evacuation from Swakopmund forced many to leave behind food stores, clothing, and other essentials, which took great effort to retrieve later.37 The arrival of refugees, fueled by the false expectation of imminent invasion in Swakopmund, seems to have further spurred the spread of misinformation. The local paper deplored the rumors circulating in Windhoek. Cissy Willich noted in her diary that, without regular news apart from British propaganda, German colonists were more than capable of frightening each other with their speculative stories. By December she had already remarked on the growing shortages in Windhoek. Although there was enough meat and dairy from local herds to feed everyone, other necessities were less plentiful. As Christmas approached, “Chocolate was completely absent. Baking is only possible if one has a supply of flour, since our monthly ration is not exactly rich.” She remarked on depleted goods, too, “If I see something useful in a store, I buy it immediately, and if possible, a small stockpile, or else it is gone in two days, bought by someone else. Material for clothing and undergarments are especially hard to come by, and soap, toothpaste, and other important things are equally scarce.” Willich clearly had more financial resources than many others in the colony, as she bought canned fruit during a visit in Rehoboth to send as Christmas gifts to soldiers in the field.38

The Inevitable Defeat On 13 January 1915 South African forces landed in Swakopmund harbor without opposition, forming the northwestern spearhead that became the main thrust of the South African assault. Reinforcements in Lüderitzbucht led a second push inland from the southwest, while a third party launched a southeastern front on the Orange River. Hampering the assault from Swakopmund under Botha’s command was a shortage of fodder for draft animals due to persistent drought, worsened as retreating Germans poisoned water supplies and destroyed railway lines, and so forcing the South Africans to import their own water by ship and to rebuild the railway from Swakopmund inland. A surprise engagement on 20 March in Jakalswater near Karibib resulted in their capture of nearly two hundred German soldiers.39 A lesser prong of the South African invasion had resumed from Lüderitzbucht inland beginning in mid-December. German accounts later recalled that, as South African troops moved inexorably inland from multiple directions, German women

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and children fled at their approach. Neighbors avidly debated among each other whether to abandon their herds and homesteads, with no clear answer in sight. Diarist H.W. Kaufmann recalled, “Various white women from Otjimbingwe whose men are fighting in the field chose to flee through Karibib to the North. Their homes were later plundered by the Boers.” Kaufmann stayed put, the only white resident of his daughter’s farm, with only an occasional guest to enjoy his large storehouse of food.40 Those who chose to withdraw from area farms to cities could only further strain the urban ration supply. The governor issued strict rations on grains, coffee, and sugar as of 1 January 1915. As Cissy Willich noted, already by mid-February the stores of crucial foods were nearly exhausted, and Africans were most deprived: “Food is becoming alarmingly scarce. Our monthly rations are severely cut. . . . Feeding the natives in particular is becoming more and more difficult. They receive meat and cornmeal in the main, and among them everywhere there is dissatisfaction that they must give up their delicacies—coffee, sugar, even some of their customary rice”41 The shortage of food and cramped quarters in the cities also courted the danger of illness. Willich reported that an outbreak of diphtheria in March 1915 had killed three German children and forced the closure of the schools, dormitories, and kindergartens. She further noted that the horses in the city were dying off from the lack of fodder and distemper was rampant among the dogs. By the end of the month, the south of the colony was being evacuated, bringing more white settler women and children by train and wagon throughout March and April. By 22 April she recounted that typhus and scarlet fever cases now were spreading in Windhoek, too.42 White settlers who contemplated evacuation were not only fearful of regular South African forces but also of looters, both black and white, whom Willich claimed were stripping the abandoned farms of all their possessions. Collectively, war memoirists describe the chaotic months as one white settlement after another fell to enemy hands, alleging British and Afrikaner troops and various brigand native bands and other opportunists pillaged deserted homesteads of household goods and valuable cattle herds. Willich also reported that Africans from Walvis Bay had looted Swakopmund, deploring that the British had allowed the looting and remarking that the South African army’s tolerance of Africans’ plundering demonstrated the inadequacy of the British as colonial rulers.43 One by one South African forces occupied German settlements in the south, southwest, and east. On 20 April Keetmanshoop fell; the matron of the Women’s League’s Homeland House dormitory was later able to report that all of her charges were brought to safety, but the South African troops had stripped the building of its furnishings. The case was typical; the German Colonial Office’s journal reported that whole columns of cattle and railcars full of home furnishings were transported back to the Cape Colony, reverberating the disturbing echoes of past uprisings: “So, much that after the unhappy uprisings of the years 1904–1907 was renewed at the cost of great work, effort, and money is now again laid to waste. It is also to

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be concluded, given the circumstances, that among our natives were some restive elements who did not let the opportunity go amiss to rob and plunder.”44 The South African government promised reparations for property damaged in their campaign, but these would not have covered alleged looting by Africans and others. Later German reports indicated that a few farmers had been partially reimbursed, but claimed many lost all their property and livelihood and were forced to throw themselves on the generosity of their neighbors.45

Uprising in Rehoboth Germans feared violence or rebellion by Africans far more than they feared the South African forces. A number of German accounts charged that the South Africans encouraged Africans’ insurgency, especially by paying them hard currency for cattle of dubious ownership, distributing firearms to them, and allowing their exiled leader Samuel Maharero to send his tribal emissaries across the border to incite the local Herero to rebel. But white settlers’ anxiety finally came to its deepest fruition in the Rehoboth Baster uprising in April 1915. The biracial Rehoboth Basters were nominally part of the German protectorate forces, but had been guaranteed freedom from involvement in the fray. Historians argue that the Rehoboth Basters feared the loss of their lands and independence during the war. When a Rehoboth Baster company nevertheless was assigned to guard South African prisoners of war, they abandoned their post, allowing their prisoners to escape. The German order was given to disarm the Rehoboth Basters. From their central point in Rehoboth, they rose up and attacked several area police stations and reportedly plundered the German farms in the district. They killed several resident German men and abducted the surviving women, only to abandon them later. There were a number of atrocities against civilians on both sides at the outset of the conflict, and lists of the dead include thirteen German civilians and police, and ten Rehoboth Basters. Women were among the victims and witnesses to these atrocities, and, as in previous colonial uprisings, many of the participants owed their presence in the colony to the efforts and funding of colonial societies in Germany. Weak advice to isolated German farmwomen published in the Southwest in March 1915 suggested that speaking with one’s African retainers in German would help to retain their loyalties.46 However, in most cases rebellious Rehoboth Basters deliberately spared German women captives. Luise Kirschenlohr, an immigrant cook sponsored through the Brakwater Home Farm, was in the colony only half a year when the war began, and had worked on George Eberhardt’s farm for only a few days as a housekeeper for the widower and as caregiver for his three young children before the uprising. Rehoboth Basters allegedly robbed and executed him, but allowed her to flee with his children.47

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An especially gruesome attack took place on Farm Blumfelde bei Hoachanas, and was discovered only several days after the event. Farmer and reservist officer Karl Bauer, who had fought in the Herero War and had been released as unfit for military service, resided on the farm with his wife and six-week-old baby. Unidentified assailants, including several of his own employees, attacked the farmer and his family. The actors included three unknown men and a Bergdamara who might have been working for the Rehoboth Basters; they felled him with an axe and then shot him; two men hauled his wife out of her home and held her fast while a third executed her with two shots to the head. Her body was returned to the house and left lying there. The group plundered the home and left the crying baby to die of thirst in its cradle. Cissy Willich heard rumors of the incident, but attributed the actions to Red Nation Nama insurgents without proof. In contrast to the Bauers, several other area German families were able to evacuate safely, but lost all their farms’ livestock and movable property. Willich noted that, in the wake of the uprising, a number of women settlers in Rehoboth had fled to the police stations and were transported under their protection to Windhoek, underscoring that the network of local German police remained at their posts, ready to keep white colonists safe from the potential of Africans’ violence, rather than support the military defense of the colony.48 Seitz blamed the South African regime for the Rehoboth Basters’ betrayal, remarking,“The unconscionable provocation of England heightened the danger of murder of the German men, women, and children in close proximity who remained behind on the German farms, as the natives saw that England rewarded rather than punished the treacherous Rehoboth Basters for the murder of German men, women and children.”49 Historians doubt that Botha accepted the Rehoboth Basters’ overtures. As previously noted, both the South African and German forces employed Africans as servants and porters, but explicit attitudes of racial superiority led both sides to maintain all-white armies.50 It was only a matter of time until the German resistance met its inevitable defeat. As the end approached, an unnamed female author published in the Southwest reflected on the courageous ideal of the German woman in the colony, advising her sisters not to voice their disappointment, and to express their bravery—not in words, but with silence. Windhoek announced a final ration allotment on 4 May. Willich queued four hours to receive her share. She also described the grim atmosphere of tears and gritted teeth surrounding the final withdrawal of troops from Windhoek and the evacuation of the governor and his wife to Grootfontein. Willich further noted that, since the armed forces did not dare leave the city unprotected from Africans, a detachment remained for that purpose. She recounted a number of alleged atrocities by various Africans, including the murder of a white soldier by black workers under his watch and the attack on the Bauer homestead. She remarked, “Dear Fate, we would bear everything but spare us from the one thing, the worst, from a general uprising of the natives!” While awaiting the surren-

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der of Windhoek, Willich volunteered as a nurse for the Red Cross, cleaning the field hospital rooms and caring for typhus cases and wounded soldiers, noting that there were no remaining African servants to perform heavy labor.51 Willich could only hope that the arrival of the South Africans (or the English, as she called them) might restore some basic comforts, despite the humiliation of defeat. The Southwest informed its readers in Windhoek of the impending arrival of troops and the advice of the mayor, Peter Müller, who reassured the public and cautioned women and children in particular not to provoke the occupying forces: “Above all, women and children should not allow their curiosity at the arrival of troops to aggravate the enemy. It behooves us as Germans to demonstrate our national dignity in these difficult days.”52 In one signal that the arrival of the British had brought renewed resources, on 6 May the mayor advised the city’s women left in need by the continued military service of their husbands to register for assistance with municipal officials.53 Willich noted little about the immediate occupation, apart from the fact that the townsfolk were told to stay indoors during the transfer of the city. Her diary in the weeks following is sparse on details. She regarded the situation with anxiety and depression, but welcomed the newfound opportunity to send letters to friends and family in Germany, if the censors approved them. She also registered dismay at the removal and internment of perhaps thirty men from the city into South African concentration camps.54 After a long June, spent mostly in retreat, on 3 July 1915 vastly outnumbered German forces surrendered, and Seitz capitulated to General Botha. Under the peace agreement, officers and regular members of the South West African Protectorate Forces were consigned to a prison camp at Aus in District Lüderitzbucht, but many of the reservist troops were paroled back to civilian life. Cissy Willich depicted the British occupiers as encouraging civilians to return to their work, and noted the capital city’s food supply was restored by August, when Windhoek broke its long fast with new supplies of chocolates, dates, and cake.55 After the peace, former reservists had two weeks to return to their farms and resume civilian life. However, German colonists were forced to disarm as a condition of the armistice, whereas most other residents, including Rehoboth Basters, could keep their weapons. German settlers, who found themselves subject to South African legal codes, now faced a steep 10 pound fine or one to two days in jail if found guilty of applying corporal punishment against Africans. Willich and others noted that the prestige of Germans was much diminished among Africans. Willich found life in the colony too altered to endure, thanks to the weak exchange rate for South African money and fears of organized hostility from Africans: “If for once the suppositions of the God-gifted optimists come true, and the English one day withdraw after peace is made back home, then we would have a fine native uprising on our hands, as recently one English officer kindly prophesized and wished us.” She also lamented her African servants were more work-shy and insolent, but she

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could not strike them. Colonists could no longer count on sympathetic juries to exonerate their misdeeds if they acted outside of self-defense. Willich returned to Germany in late 1915.56 The Colonial Ministry also reported that in addition to the heavy financial losses, the long history of colonial scares continued to wreak its toll on isolated settlers’ nerves: “The white population, namely the unarmed farmers, are therefore fearful—this is apparent in almost all letters and reports before us—that the natives soon will commit violent acts, if not outright large-scale rebellions against the whites.” Thus, it was clear even by 1916 that World War I had only exacerbated German settlers’ long history of mistreatment and vigilantism based on the white colonial community’s rumors of the danger that Africans posed.57

The Women’s League Resumes Its Work After the armistice took effect in South West Africa on 30 July 1915, the South African government freed interned colonial civilians and allowed their return to either South West Africa or Germany, via British ports through neutral Holland. Former internees again could correspond with contacts in Germany, albeit through censored letters. Upon receiving their letters and appeals, the league once again announced the resumption of aid to South West African Germans, providing financial support and care packages with clothing and necessities. The organization’s newsletters in the pages of Colony and Home regularly printed their missives and finally was able to provide descriptions of war events from South West Africa (as well as from Cameroon, and, later, German East Africa). Not surprisingly, these accounts helped establish the wickedness of the English and the severity of German settlers’ plight: “The Southwest African settlers’ need is great, very great; where the farms were plundered and destroyed, they have nothing, nothing at all beyond what they are wearing! . . . The Women’s League is seeking the surest way to send money and packages to Southwest Africa.”58 The league’s newsletter further encouraged chapters to organize charity evenings and fund drives, and even sewing bees to ameliorate the shortage of undergarments and clothing. Soon, chapters were coming forward with small provisions for colonial families in need, such as monthly milk stipends or cartons of winter clothing. A nationwide clothing drive produced fifty-three crates of cast-off garments to be distributed in South West Africa. By the start of 1916 the German Colonial Society and Women’s League’s joint German Colonial Aid Committee had approved 328 applications from needy German colonists, awarding more than 117 families ongoing assistance. Above all, the Women’s League emphasized a German national duty to their ethnic comrades in the colonies (using the radicalized term, Volksgenossen), “who had to suffer far more for our Fatherland than we here in the homeland.”59 Despite her claims, many Germans were suffering, too, and conditions in the homeland worsened over time.

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Although Chair Heyl’s end-of-year message to her organization in 1916 was full of promise for the coming year and the future, its underlying message was one of grim resolve. She hoped for peace, the speedy restoration of German colonial lands from Germany’s enemies, and the founding of new chapters and growth in membership. She heralded the establishment of a new fundraising partnership with the German Colonial Society, the Johann-Albrecht-Spende (John Albert Fund), a charitable collection named in honor of its president, Duke Johann Albrecht of Mecklenburg, designated toward securing the future for the German colonies.60 Longtime Women’s League general secretary Gertrud von Hatten had resigned her position upon her marriage in April 1915, and Else von Boettischer replaced her. Boettischer, better known by her penname Frobenius (which she took from her second husband), was a conservative Baltic German journalist with existing ties to the Women’s League, who excelled in colonialist agitation and who built strong connections between the league and the right-wing German People’s Party (DVP) in the early 1920s. Settling into her new position, Frobenius not only alluded to Germans as a biological community, or Volk, but also asserted a more strident tone in the newsletter overall as she derided the purported high ideals of the enemy and exhorted league members to fight for Germany’s freedom.61 Her more combative language could not mask the growing impact of the hardships of the war on the organization’s membership, which dropped about 5 percent from 18,516 to 17,728, in the fifteen months from December 1914 to March 1916. The winter plan for 1916–17 called for a membership drive, which succeeded in bringing in 779 new members, nearly offsetting the 985 who departed. The period was one of acute food and fuel shortages and rising prices in Germany, as the war office struggled to supply its citizens and meet its war needs in the face of the ongoing English shipping boycott. At the behest of Empress Victoria-Augusta, members of the Berlin chapters and other women’s groups collected recycled materials to stuff quilts and pillows with, such as old newspapers or used fabric, and gathered in the afternoons to sew warm bedclothes for military hospitals.62 By April 1917 the Women’s League was reduced to collecting donations of human hair for the war industry as part of a national Red Cross campaign, various chapters cancelled winter meetings due to severe fuel shortages, and the national newsletter began running large banner ads exhorting its readers to buy war bonds. Newsletter records indicate that chapter giving was much reduced, reporting no more than a few hundred marks donations, with the exception of a 1,000-mark donation to aid German colonials from munitions-manufacturer Krupps.63 However, the continued defense of East Africa captured greater German attention for that particular colonial cause, which may have helped win over new members for the league. Frobenius deplored the tunnel vision of the majority of Germans, who remained ever mindful of the nations’ soldiers on the European fronts yet forgetful of the staunch colonial warriors. She compared the suffering

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inflicted through the British blockade of Germany to the internment of women and children in the colonies: Who attends to the fate of our German settlers? The dedicated fighters who struggle under the hot southern sun, cut off from all friends, uncomplaining and untiring in their defense of every foot of territory against the invading enemy? Only a small band of colonial friends and dependents commemorate them. Our Volk have not yet awakened en masse to colonial feeling, to experience the fate of the colonial settler as their own suffering and hardship. The broader spheres lack awareness of what those overseas have had to suffer during the war. All women should raise their voices to call on the German Volk to attend to the fates of our German settlers. And to raise loud objections against the violations inflicted against the human rights of German women and children. Just as the English have not shied away from conducting a hunger war against women and children in Europe, so have they not hesitated to capture women and children from our colonies, to deport them from their homes, and take them to concentration camps.64 Frobenius’s remarks link the sufferings of hungry Germans at home to the hapless fate of imprisoned German women and children in the colonies, while lionizing the bravery of the German East African forces in withstanding overwhelming enemy numbers. By June 1917 the valorization of East African troops under the military leadership of Lettow-Vorbeck was a prominent feature of league war propaganda, including a theater event hosted in the chapter in Lyck in East Prussia dramatizing his exploits to benefit interned East African German women and children. The league’s annual report for June 1916 through June 1917 reflects a growing treasury, expanding 10,000 marks to reach 100,810 marks, but rampant wartime inflation continued to shrink its value. Altogether, league chapters organized only seventy-four lectures and programs for the year, which indicated a sharp decline in its social activities. Likewise, the number of meetings were greatly reduced, with only thirty-three chapters holding irregular or regular assemblies, and forty chapters meeting jointly with other women’s clubs to further their war efforts. In autumn 1917 Heyl published her patriotic tract, “Why Do We Need a Colonial Women’s League during Wartime?” in which she outlined German women’s duty to needy colonials displaced by war and accompanied by an advertisement for German war bonds written in ever-more-emphatic font. Instead of looking to the future, she remarked regretfully on all the destruction of the former efforts of the league for German settler families: Since the Women’s League of the Colonial Society has existed, it has been occupied primarily with offering concrete assistance to women’s

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emigration, their settlement in the colonies, and their introduction to colonial work. The league’s efforts took effect within individual homes and has required energy, knowledge, and careful leadership. The Women’s League also has assisted women living in Africa by caring for their children, removing them from the influence of colored servants and raising them in kindergartens in the German model. Women’s League chapters in Southwest and East Africa and New Guinea have offered help and protection to women in dysfunctional relationships or those lured into unsuitable employment situations. The war has obliterated all of this. It has not only struck the institutions of the Women’s League but also destroyed the happiness and possessions of many German settlers.65 Her remarks suggested that the outlook was bleak for German colonists. In December 1917 came the rare happy news that the German government had brokered the return of interned German men, women, and children from East Africa, and the first transport of sixty had arrived via Switzerland. The league reminded its newsletter readers that a few German women and children were still detained in various camps in East Africa, Egypt, and India.66 In the summer of 1918 the Women’s League reached its tenth anniversary as auxiliary of the German Colonial Society, releasing an official history of their organization. Indeed, by autumn 1918, as Germany’s defeat reached its inevitable climax, the league’s newsletter—and presumably also its membership—were fixated on the past, particularly colonial revanchism, publishing a series of contributed articles, “Remembrances from South West Africa,” by a colonial official’s wife, Frau Jaeckel, as well as “My Experiences during the War in German East Africa,” from former Governor Schnee’s wife Ada. Soon thereafter, mutiny and street violence erupted in war-weary Germany, resulting in the abdication of the emperor. The 9 November Revolution culminated in the declaration of the Weimar Republic, which immediately sued for peace and declared armistice on 11 November.

“For the sake of the German Volk” In the aftermath of this turmoil, Hedwig Heyl addressed her membership on their obligations to the new republic, notably the voting rights for women in the Weimar constitution. Although a feminist, Heyl was not a suffragist. She registered no jubilation and lamented the fall of the monarchy. She reminded her female membership that their new civic roles made women more responsible for the public well-being. She reported that the league had affiliated with a refugee-assistance group, the Council to Care for Returning Reich-Germans, with the view to work in particular for returning colonial Germans. Various members had volunteered to

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perform clerical work and help feed soldiers, as she exhorted her members to work on despite the political changes: As heavy as our hearts are at this moment, we will not fall into despair but rather remain conscious that for the sake of the German Volk we must fulfill our responsibilities in a serious, farsighted sense. Only if all remain loyally and steadfast in their places, can a chaos be avoided which would expose us all to the most terrible dangers. . . . As a patriotic organization, we always offered our strength to our homeland, and we do not want to fail even in this most difficult time. Above all, we must extend our redoubled love and care to the colonial Germans, to demonstrate our thanks for the heroic acts of their leader, LettowVorbeck and the other unnamed heroes, to whom we are bound in undying gratitude.67 The league had entered an uncertain new political environment. Political parties now competed for women’s votes using nationalist and colonialist slogans on the nationalist right. The league did not officially declare a party allegiance. German colonial organizations fixated on the past rather than the future, as evinced by their joint founding of the Kolonial-Kriegerdankspende (Tribute Fund for Colonial War Veterans) to aid former colonial soldiers. Germany’s prospects for the return of its former colonies in peace negotiations were grim. A propaganda campaign between Great Britain and Germany had erupted in 1916 in which the British charged German colonial troops with war crimes. In 1918 Britain fanned the flames, releasing a compilation of official records and oral testimony (some of contested validity) from South West Africa that detailed German colonials’ abuse of Africans as a British Foreign Office Blue Book titled Report on the Natives of South West Africa and Their Treatment by Germany. British officials claimed that German atrocities in the colony demonstrated Germans’ abject barbarism and underscored that the more enlightened nations, such as England, were better suited as colonial rulers. Former German colonial officials and spokespersons challenged what they referred to as the British Kolonialschuldlüge (colonial guilt lie) at the Versailles Peace negotiations to little avail, vociferously countering these claims in print during the following decades.68 The campaign to restore the German colonies became the most important league initiative of the early Weimar era. Colonial interest groups banded together on this issue. The league and Women’s Red Cross Association for the Colonies drew on the broader support of hundreds of German women’s organizations in launching a nationwide petition campaign to restore the German colonies in December 1918 and arranging a national meeting of signatory organizations on International Women’s Day 1919. A press release to 240 German newspapers proclaimed the common resolve of Germany’s women against the “theft of the German colonies.”

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Their platform read, “We strongly reject the allegations of mistreatment against native peoples. We are convinced that Germans, above all other peoples, have treated them most humanely.”69 The leadership of the league, with the backing of other bourgeois women’s groups to restore the German colonies, reflects not only what historians newly have recognized as the maternalist-nationalism of women’s groups on the right in early Weimar, but also how these newly enfranchised women harnessed International Women’s Day for their own political agenda. The league chapter in Heidelberg further organized an equally symbolic Valentine’s Day public protest, with local chapters of the German Colonial Society and the Women’s Red Cross Association for the Colonies.70 Nonetheless, the signing of the Versailles Treaty on 28 June 1919 resulted in the permanent loss of the German colonies. South West Africa became a League of Nations mandate under South African administration. In September the league also joined German popular resistance to the prosecution of German leaders as war criminals. German women were in a stronger position to make defensive claims about the essential morality of Germany against foreign accusations of war crimes. A wide swath of bourgeois men’s and women’s organizations and political parties from the non-socialist left to the far right protested the detrimental conditions of the peace negotiations and unfairness of the Versailles Treaty for German interests in general, among which were the imposition of territorial losses, demilitarization, and assumption of sole guilt for the war, which entailed massive repayments to the victors for all war damages.71 For German colonial organizations, these protests reflected their continued existential fight. Frobenius reflected on the question, “Why do we need a Colonial Women’s League?” after the forced repatriation of many former colonials in late 1919: “Many voices now ask us, why we need colonial organizations, now that Germany has lost its colonies? To which we must respond yet again, ‘Do not forget our Colonial Germans!’ . . . It is our holy duty not to leave our Colonial Germans in the lurch!” At the end of 1919 the editors of the journal Colony and Home converted the magazine’s title to Ausland und Heimat (Overseas and Home), reflecting in its cover page on “Thirty-Five Years of German Colonial Politics and Their End.” The periodical began to publish about women’s emigration from Germany, featuring former German colonies and other overseas destinations for women seeking a new start overseas.72 Their new focus held far less appeal for German readers, damaging the league’s reach through its pages. In January 1920, soon after reaching the milestone of her seventieth birthday, Hedwig Heyl resigned from her public commitments, including her leadership of the league, replaced by her second-in-command, Hedwig von Bredow, a widely traveled and longtime member of the league, who had visited South West Africa in 1912. After serving as Colonial Society president for twenty-five years, Mecklenburg died in February of 1920. Former governor of South West Africa Theodor Seitz succeeded him. The two organizations continued

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to work for the Johann-Albrecht Spende and other welfare projects through at least 1922, but cooperation dwindled since neither organization could afford to sponsor further German colonization.73

Conclusion World War I immediately resulted in the end of sponsored German women’s settlement and the loss of all shipping and communication between Germany and its colonial empire. German colonialist women demonstrated through patriotic activism in the war that they were prepared to devote themselves wholeheartedly to the home front. Not only did the league conduct war service through the NFD, but it also continued to aid refugee and interned Germans from the colonies. Once hostilities in the colonies ended, the league also assisted German settlers in need. The German Colonial Society cooperated with them in fund drives to aid displaced Germans from the colonies and settlers, as well as celebrate the leader of the East German campaign, Lettow-Vorbeck, through donations for colonial veterans. Wartime propaganda demonstrated the radicalization of the league’s ideology, as reflected in its adoption of völkisch nationalist appeals. Germans in South West Africa experienced the hardships of combat, invasion, and looting, as well as the Rehoboth Baster uprising, epidemics, food shortages, and internments, but Africans suffered severe hardships and famine, with little German effort to ameliorate their situation. White settlers who remained in South West Africa during the occupation surrendered their weapons, gave up corporal discipline of their servants, and suffered anxieties over the potential for a general African uprising. Many German settlers returned to Germany, where they experienced the hardships of the British blockade, inflation, mutiny, revolution, and surrender. Those who remained in South West Africa chafed against their disarmament, and the new conditions of life under South African rule. In postwar Germany the league gradually embraced the new political rights for German women under Weimar, as its members campaigned unsuccessfully for the restoration of the German colonies, alongside other German maternalist-nationalist women, as well as with fellow colonial organizations. The league began postwar work to aid German women’s emigration, but also continued to assist German settlers in South West Africa, who remained under the administration of the Union of South Africa. The league achieved far greater organizational autonomy from the Colonial Society in 1920, following the death of the Colonial Society’s longtime president Mecklenburg. But the retirement of their staunch leader Hedwig Heyl and the weakening membership and treasury were ominous signals that the league would face difficulty remaining relevant after the permanent loss of the German colonies. As the following chapter reveals, the league struggled to survive in the early 1920s.

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Notes 1. Hew Strachan, The First World War in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 4–5; Edward Paice, World War I: The African Front. An Imperial War on the African Continent (New York: Pegasus Books, 2008), 3; Helmuth Stoecker, “The First World War,” in German Imperialism in Africa from the Beginnings until the Second World War, ed. Helmuth Stoecker, trans. Bernd Zöllner (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1986), 270–96. 2. In September through November 1914 Japanese forces seized the German naval colony in Qingdao, China, and German Pacific islands north of the equator; south of the equator, Australia occupied German New Guinea and the Solomons, while New Zealand invaded Samoa. Strachan, The First World War in Africa, 65–69. 3. The war memoirs of Theodor Seitz, Südafrika im Weltkriege. Der Zusammenbruch in Deutsch-Südwestafrika (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1920), 21. Jan Bart Gewald depicts thousands of African deaths from the famine, which weakened Ovambo political structures and accelerated Ovambo labor migration to the center of the territory. Jan Bart Gewald, “Near Death in the Streets of Karibib: Famine, Migrant Labour and the Coming of Ovambo to Central Namibia,” Journal of African History 44, no. 2 (2003): 211–39. 4. Lettow-Vorbeck became a German national hero as a result of his exploits and postwar propaganda helped establish the myth of his loyal African soldiers (Askaris) (Stoecker, “The First World War,” 273–75). Michelle Moyd, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014) tells a more complicated view of the Askari soldiers’ relations to the Germans and East Africans. 5. On the NFD and German women’s service in World War I, see Barbara Guttmann, Weibliche Heimarmee: Frauen in Deutschland, 1914–1918 (Weinheim: Deutscher Studien Verlag, 1989), esp. 130–41; and Ursula von Gersdorff, Frauen im Kriegsdienst, 1914–1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1969), 16–22. 6. DKG 185, 138. 7. DKG 185, 88, Sautter in Sesenheim. 8. DKG 160, 40, An den Kolonialen Hilfsausschusses der deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft, 11 Feb. 1915. 9. Quote from “Letter from Klein-Windhoek,” KNvKH 9, no. 11 (1915-16): 10. 10. Matthew Stibbe, “The Internment of Civilians by Belligerent States during World War I and the Response of the International Committee of the Red Cross,” Journal of Contemporary History 41, no. 1 (2006): 1–19. There are no International Red Cross (IRC) inspection reports for South West Africa, per communication with Fabrizio Bensi, IRC archivist. Daniel Steinbach, “Challenging European Colonial Supremacy: The Internment of ‘Enemy Aliens’ in German East Africa during World War I,” in Other Combatants, Other Fronts: Competing Histories of the First World War, ed. James Kitchen, Alisa Miller, and Laura Rowe (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), 153–76 argue that these internments were racially demeaning, since blacks were more typically subject to colonial incarceration. 11. Erika Kuhlmann, Of Little Comfort: War Widows, Fallen Soldiers, and the Remaking of Nation after the Great War (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 24–27; Ute Daniel, The War from Within: German Women in the First World War (Oxford: Berg, 1997), 242–45. 12. See my article concerning war rumors and censorship in South West Africa: O’Donnell, “Public Danger of Rumor-Mongering.” 13. Quote from “Aufruf! Frauen Deutschlands, helft für unsere Kolonien arbeiten,” pamphlet, DKG 157, 174 reverse (bold in original). 14. On the Hilfsausschuß der Kolonialgesellschaft, see Hedwig Heyl, Aus meinem Leben, vol. 2 Weibliches Schaffen und Werken (Berlin: Schwetschke und Sohn, 1925), 85. Jean Quataert,

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15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

Staging Philanthropy, 272–83, examines the local nature of wartime philanthropy and relief until the state centralized these functions in late 1916. Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 6; and Young Sun Hong, Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State, 1919–1933 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 16–23, discuss the German state’s strict regulation over war charities after 1917 to enforce rationalization. “Aufruf! Frauen Deutschlands.” “Aufruf! Frauen Deutschlands”; articles “Aus den Abteilungen,” and “Aus dem Jahresbericht des Frauenbundes der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft für 1914” (Fortsetzung aus Nr. 39) KNvKH 8 no. 40 (1914-15): 10. H.W. Kaufmann, Meine Erlebnisse in Deutsch-Südwestafrika, 1913–1916. Tagebuchblätter von H.W. Kaufmann (Bonn: Verlag von Johannes Schergens, 1916), 27. Strachan, World War I, 87. Quote from Kaufmann, Meine Erlebnisse, 27. He found the American newspapers more objective. Signs of collective support of the war and demands for cash and carry are contained in various advertisements and reports: “Aufruf an die deutsche Frauen in Südwest,” “Ein Bittgottesdienst,” and “Eine Huldigungstelegramm,” Südwest 5, no. 62 (4 Aug. 1914). “Historicus Africanus,” Der 1. Weltkrieg in Deutsch-Südwestafrika 1914/15 vol. 1 (Windhoek: Glanz & Gloria Verlag, 2011), 16–30. Quote from “Eine Ergänzung zu den Reutermeldungen,” Südwest 5, no. 62 (4 Aug. 1914). Quote from “Das Echo in Swakopmund,” DSWAZ 17, no. 62 (5 Aug. 1914). “Bekanntmachung,” Südwest 5, no. 65 (14 Aug. 1914). “Kriegsbanknoten,” DSWAZ 17, no. 65 (12 Aug. 1914); mobilization announced 15 Aug. 2014, DSWAZ 17, no. 65. Quote from “Private Liebestätigkeit,” emphasis in original; see also “Aufruf! Deutscher Frauenverein vom Rotem Kreuz für den Kolonien,” DSWAZ 17, no. 64 (12 Aug. 1914). The paper reported that thirty-five individuals had signed up for free first aid training in Swakopmund. DSWAZ 17, no. 65 (15 Aug. 1914). “Aus Okahandja” and “Lokales,” DSWAZ 17, no. 67 (22 Aug. 1914). “Unser ‘Offener Brief an den Gouverneur,’” 17, no. 71 (5 Sept. 1917). Seitz, Südafrika im Weltkriege, 18. Quoted from “Extrablatt der Zeitung,” Südwest (13 Oct. 1914). Quoted from Cissy Willich, Kriegstage in Südwest: Tagebuchblätter aus den Jahren 1914 und 1915 (Oldenburg i. Gr.; Druck und Verlag von Gerhard Stalling, 1916), 25. Strachan, First World War, 86; “Historicus Africanus,” Der 1. Weltkrieg, 48–49, Gerald L’Ange, Urgent Imperial Service: South African Forces in German South West Africa, 1914–1915 (Rivonia: Ashanti Publishing, 1991), 227, estimates thirty thousand Africans in Union of South Africa service. “Das freiwilligen Korps der Buren,” Südwest 5, no. 75 (18 Sept. 1914); “Einmarschplanen der Kapbriten,” and “Beschießung Swakopmunds,” DSWAZ 17, no. 74 (16 Sept. 1914). “Einmarschplanen der Kapbriten,” “Beschießung Swakopmunds.” Quote from “Beschießung Swakopmunds”; “Einmarschplanen der Kapbriten,” Kaufmann, Meine Erlebnisse, 32. “Lüderitzbucht und Swakopmund,” Südwest 5, no. 77 (25 Sept. 1914). “Krieg in den deutschen Schutzgebieten. IV. Südwestafrika,” II. Mitteilung. DKB 26, nos. 1 and 2 (15 Jan. 1915): 32–33, contains a first-hand account of the Lüderitzbucht events. On German awareness of the South African concentration camps in the Second Afrikaner War, see Kaufmann, Meine Erlebnisse, 54, in which he cites a mortality figure of twenty-eight thousand Afrikaner women and children. Swakopmund was incorrectly identified as the first city to be occupied. “Die Besetzung Swakopmunds,” DSWAZ 17, no. 75 (19 Sept. 1914). “Deutsch Südwestafrika. Nachweisung von Personalien aus Südwestafrika seit Kriegsausbruch,” DKB 26, no. 6 (15 Mar. 1915): 183–84. “Aus den Abteilungen,” “Aus dem Jahresbe-

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34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58.

richt des Frauenbundes der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft für 1914,” (Fortsetzung aus Nr. 39) KNvKH 8, 40 (1914-1915): 10; “Ein Brief der Vorsitzenden der Abteilung Lüderitzbucht an den Frauenbund der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft aus dem Kriegsgefangenenlager in Roberts Heights bei Pretoria,” KNvKH 19, no. 2 (1915–16); “Brief der Leiterin unseres Kindergartens in Lüderitzbucht vom 3. Oktober 1915,” KNvKH 10, no. 14 (1915–16). Strachan, First World War, pp. 69–78; 82. Quote from “Aus dem Schutzgebiet. Swakopmund,” Südwest 5, no. 78 (28 Sept. 1914); Willich, Kriegstagebuch, 22. Quote from “Ein Rundschreiben,” emphasis in original—also cited from the issue “Der Sieg von Sandfontein,” Südwest 5, no. 78 (29 Sept. 1914). Willich, Kriegstagebuch, 25; Kaufmann, Meine Erlebnisse, 32. “Aus einem Brief der Oberin unseres Heimathauses in Keetmanshoop,” Kriegs-Nummer von KH 9, no. 23 (1915–16); Kaufmann, Meine Erlebnisse, 32–33. “Aus Windhuk. Die tollsten Gerüchte,” DSWAZ 5, no. 78 (29 Sept. 1914). Quote from Willich, Kriegstagebuch, 40; On shortages, Willich, Kriegstagebuch, 51–52, 60. Strachan, First World War, 83–87. Oscar Hintrager, Geschichte von Südafrika (Munich, Verlag R. Oldenbourg, 1952), 429. Quote from Kaufmann, Meine Erlebnisse, 39–40. Kaufmann, Meine Erlebnisse, 41; Seitz, Südafrika im Weltkrieg, 19; and quote from Willich, Kriegstagebuch, 60. Willich, Kriegstagebuch, 65–80. Willich, Kriegstagebuch, 30–31. Quote from “Der Krieg in den deutschen Schutzgebieten. IV. Deutsch-Südwestafrika,” 6. Mitteilung DKB 26, no. 44 (1 Dec. 1915): 416 and “Jahresbericht des Frauenbundes,” KNvKH 10, no. 41 (1915–1916). “Der Krieg in den deutschen Schutzgebieten. IV. Mitteilung, Deutsch-Südwestafrika,” 7. Mitteilung DKB v. 27, no. 2–3 (1 Feb. 1916): 51. The source of the remuneration is not clear; German Colonial Society among others set up an assistance fund for displaced colonists. “An die deutschen Frauen im Schutzgebiet: Über unsere deutsche Sprache im Umgang mit den Eingeborenen,” Südwest 6, no. 24 (22 Mar. 1915); Budack, “Der ‘Bastardaufstand’ in Deutsch Südwestafrika,” Afrikanische Heimatkalendar (1974): 3 49–52. Budack’s interview with Luise Merders, née Kirschenlohr, 83 years of age, “Der ‘Bastardaufstand,’” 53–54. Budack, “‘Der ‘Bastardaufstand,’”; Willich, Kriegstagebuch, 84. Quote from Seitz, Südafrika im Weltkriege, 22. See, for example, Budack, “Der ‘Bastardaufstand,’” and Strachan, First World War on racial views. Seitz vehemently expresses his distrust of Africans in Südafrika im Weltkriege. Willich, Kriegstagebuch, 85–91, quote, 91; “Der deutschen Frau,” Südwest 6, no. 29 (8 Apr. 1915); “Letzte Proviant-Verteilung,” Extrablatt der Südwest (4 May 1915). “Die Maßnahmen des Stadtrats,” Südwest 6 (no. illeg.) (6 May 1914). Emphasis in original. Extrablatt der Südwest (6 May 1915). Willich, Kriegstagebuch, 92–96. Willich, Kriegstagebuch, 100. Willich, Kriegstagebuch, 109–10. Quote (10). See also Kaufmann, Meine Erlebnisse, 75–81. Quote from “Der Krieg in den deutschen Schutzgebieten. IV. Mitteilung: Deutsch-Südwestafrika,” 7. Mitteilung DKB 27, no. 2–3 (1 Feb. 1916): 51; Robert J. Gordon, “Vagrancy, Law & ‘Shadow Knowledge’: Internal Pacification, 1915–1939,” in Hayes et al., Namibia under South African Rule, 51–76. Quote from “Die Notlage unserer Ansiedler in Südwestafrika,” KNvKH 8 no. 52 (191415): 10. “Brief der Vorsitzenden unserer Abteilung Lüderitzbucht, Fräulein Wehlmann, aus englischer Kriegsgefangenschaft,” KNvKH 8, no. 37 (1914-15): 10; “Von der Mitarbeit des Frauenbundes im Kolonialen Hilfsausschuß,” KNvKH 9 no. 4 (1915-16): 10. See also Magda

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59.

60. 61.

62.

63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68.

69. 70.

71.

72.

73.

Bubek-Rodatz, “Meine Kriegserlebnisse in Kamerun,” KNvKH 9, (1915-16): nrs. 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. Quote from “Frauenbund-Spende,” KNvKH 9, no 1(1915-16): 10. “Von der Mitarbeit des Frauenbundes im Kolonialen Hilfs-Ausschuß,” KNvKH 9, no. 4 (1915-16): 10; “Jahresbericht des Frauenbundes für 1914,” KNvKH 9, no. 47 (1915-16): 10. “Zum Jahreswechsel an unsere Gauverbände, Abteilungen und Mitglieder,” KNvKH 9, no. 14 (1915-16). On her marriage, see “Jahresbericht des Frauenbundes für 1914.” Lora Wildenthal, “Mass-Marketing Colonialism and Nationalism: The Career of Else Frobenius in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany,” in Nation, Politik und Geschlecht: Frauenbewegungen und Nationalismus in der Moderne, ed. Ute Planert (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2000), 328–45. Frobenius’s remarks are found in the sarcastically titled, “Die hohen Ideale unserer Feinde,” KNvKH 9, no. 23 (1915-16): 10. “Jahresbericht des Frauenbundes,” KNvKH 9, no. 41 (1915-16): 10; “Arbeitsplan des Frauenbundes für den Winter,” KNvKH 10, no. 1 (1916): 7. “Aus den Abteilungen,” KNvKH 10, no. 7 (1916-17): 10. The drive resulted in seventy new members by January 1917 (“Zum Jahreswechsel an unsere Gauverbände, Abteilungen, und Mitglieder!” KNvKH 10, no. 15 (1916-17): 6. Germans used human hair to make transmission belts. “Deutsche Frauenhaar-Sammlung!” KNvKH 10, no. 27 (1916-17): 10; “Jahresbericht des Frauenbundes.” Quoted from “Frauen und Kinder in Deutsch-Ostafrika,” KNvKH 10, no. 14 (1916-17), 7, presumably by Frobenius. Quoted from Hedwig Heyl, “Warum brauchen wir im Kriege den Frauenbund der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft?” KNvKH 11, no. 2 (1917-18): 7. “Aus den Abteilungen,” KNvKH 10, no. 43 (1916-17): 7; “Warum brauchen wir die Frauenbund”; “Empfang der deutsch-ostafrikanischen Frauen und Kinder in der Schweiz durch den Frauenbund der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft.” KNvKH 11, no. 20 (1917-18): 6–7. Hedwig Heyl, “Unsere Pflichten im neuen Staat,” KH 12 no. 9 (1918-19): 8. British Foreign Office, Report on the Natives of Southwest-Africa and their Treatment by Germany (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1918). For more information and background on the Kolonialschuldlüge see Jan-Bart Gewald and Jeremy Silvester, “Footsteps and Tears: An Introduction to the construction and context of the 1918 Blue Book,” in Words Cannot Be Found: German Colonial Rule in Namibia: annotated reprint of the 1918 Blue Book, edited by Jan-Bart Gewald and Jeremy Silvester (Brill: Leiden, 2003): xi–xxxviii; and Christina Twomey, “Atrocity Narratives and Inter-Imperial Rivalry: Britain Germany and the Treatment of ‘Native Races,’ 1904–1939, “ in Evil, Barbarism and Empire: Britain and Abroad, c. 1830–2000, ed. T. Crook and B. Taithe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 201–25; and W. Roger Louis, Great Britain and Germany’s Lost Colonies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). Quote from “Kolonialkundgebung deutscher Frauenvereine,” KH 12, no. 21 (1918-19): 8. “Welche Pflicht hat der koloniale Frauenbund im Augenblick zu erfüllen?” KH 12, no. 18 (1918-19): 8; “Aus den Abteilungen,” “Aufruf zur Veredlung des Parteikampfes” KH 12, no. 25 (1918-19): 7; Kolonialkundgebung deutscher Frauenvereine,” KH 12, no. 20 (1918-19): 7. “Raffael Scheck, “Women against Versailles: Maternalism and Nationalism of Female Bourgeois Politicians in the Early Weimar Republic,” German Studies Review 22, no. 1 (Feb. 1999): 21–42, esp. fn32. Quote from “Wozu brauchen wir einen Kolonialen Frauenbund?” KH 12, no. 32 (1918-19): 7, presumably by Frobenius. Emphasis in original; Ausland und Heimat 12, no. 40 (1919-20) and no. 46 (1919-20): 7. S.v. her entry in the German National Biography, available online at https://www.deutsch-bi ographie.de/sfz6973.html#dbocontent (accessed 22 Feb. 2022); Venghiattis, “Mobilizing,” 329 states the league revised its statutes in 1927 to dissolve its organizational ties to the Colonial Society, retaining only the reference in its name, but there is little archival evidence of organizational interaction after 1920.

  CHAPTER 8

Weimar Women’s Colonial Activism

Although German colonial rule ended in 1915, many remaining Germans in South West Africa staunchly maintained their former views on race and gender as they asserted that the territory still required German women’s particular talents as wives and mothers to make a home for future generations of settlers. In 1914 the outbreak of World War I forced an end to longstanding sponsored German women’s settlement efforts in South West Africa, which had first begun in 1898. Germany lost all its former colonies to occupation, jeopardizing the future of German settlers. The Union of South Africa, which had imposed military control over South West Africa from Germans in 1915, maintained martial law there through 1919. Under the terms of the peace that ended World War I, the Union of South Africa assumed civil administration over the territory as a League of Nations mandate. The South African administration expelled almost half of the German population of the former colony of South West Africa to Germany in 1919, further reducing the sustainability of the local German community. This chapter examines the remaining German settlers’ struggle to maintain their ethnic identity in the mandate of South West Africa, and the central role of German Women’s League in fostering these efforts. As a private organization, the Women’s League of the German Colonial Society had a long history of sponsoring unmarried German women’s settlement in South West Africa before the war. The league struggled to maintain organizational cohesion during the war through women’s war work. Now it faced an existential crisis in its aftermath: it suffered devastating loss of membership and funding in the early 1920s. After the surrender of the colonies, the group’s leadership struggled to maintain the integrity of the league as the chief German colonialist organization for women by lobbying for the return of the colonies. After the Weimar Treaty permanently stripped Germany of its colonies, however, the league gradually began to shift its area of activism toward support of German women’s overseas emigration

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in general. I argue that the league was not successful in mobilizing its former members to aid German women’s emigration, since most independent German immigrants were lost to Germany when they assimilated into their new homelands. The league could not compete with the established organizations that already sustained German diasporic ties to foreign ethnic German communities (Auslandsdeutsche). Instead, the league struggled financially as its membership and fundraising declined, which in turn forced it to curtail its postwar welfare efforts, the most visible of which remained supporting German settlers in Africa.1 By 1922 the league’s monetary donations had declined so severely and currency exchange rates into gold-backed British pounds had become so unfavorable that the league could barely afford the cost of freight on British shipping lines to the mandate of South West Africa. The organization’s difficulties sharpened still further as hyperinflation peaked in 1923 in Weimar Germany. The main Berlin office of the league shuttered its doors, laid off its paid clerical staff, and removed to a room in the German Colonial Society’s building, the Africa House. By 1924 German women in South West Africa had begun to reverse the league’s longstanding charity to the colonies; they now were donating crates of essentials for the needy in Germany. In 1925 the Women’s League barely collected any dues and had nearly ceased all activism. However, as this chapter recounts, the league revived after 1926 through infusions of cash from the Weimar Foreign Ministry aimed at renewal of its former efforts to settle women in South West Africa. By 1932, the league even surpassed its former parent organization, the German Colonial Society in membership as Germany’s most popular colonial organization.2 The Women’s League resumed sponsoring German women’s colonization in South West Africa in 1926 after more than a decade in hiatus. However, the revived efforts differed substantially from the Wilhelmine Era, as this chapter investigates. Key obstacles had arisen in the early 1920s, making the territory far less hospitable for German settlement. In addition, the new female colonization program was less generous, and so assisted fewer women. The new terms required most grantees to lay out a third of the fare for their ship passages to South West Africa, repay the remaining two-thirds in installments, and still save for a possible return passage by themselves. These new expenses reversed the prewar effort to encourage working-class maids to emigrate to Africa in favor of women with at least some means. Lack of supervisory oversight of the sponsored immigrant women posed another serious difficulty—no longer could German colonial administrators residing in the territory safeguard their well-being. South African officials administered the mandate, including many former members of invading forces, most of whom were hostile or at best indifferent to German women’s immigration. In addition, the discontinuation of the prewar maids’ dormitory system to train and house unemployed immigrant women from Germany necessitated self-reliance and quick acclimation for new arrivals. Local members of the Wom-

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en’s League in South West Africa, especially chapter heads, assumed much of the responsibility for their housing and employment, as well as protecting these fledgling arrivals’ reputations. Archival records reflect how they advised and sometimes even sheltered their charges; they also helped them navigate the terms of their employment contracts, immigration procedures, and local customs. As the league district head for South West Africa, Frida Voigts annually reported on their welfare, replacing local German administrators as the recordkeepers of the program. She and fellow league members’ correspondence about the sponsored immigrants constitute most of the archival sources for the Weimar women’s settlement program in Africa. This chapter first examines the changed circumstances in the postwar mandate, then culminates in an analysis of the revival of postwar German women’s settlement. The chief sources include archived Women’s Colonial League correspondence in the 1920s and 1930s with the German Foreign Ministry, supplemented by South West African newspapers. The archival reports are useful for their revelations concerning German women’s views of the Weimar era settlement program and its participants. In particular, they provide historical evidence of gossip and innuendo about how newcomers fit within the understandings of respectability in the German community. These sources also underscore the changing role of German settler women under the mandate. Germans felt imperiled in the mandate of the 1920s; the new South African administration in the territory made them insecure about their future there, but many also felt removed and disconnected from the rapidly changing and weakened postwar German homeland.

The Early Weimar Era and the Decline of German Popular Colonialism Historians contend that German colonialism faded in popularity in the early 1920s, thanks to Germany’s reduced international status and the loss of all its former overseas empire in World War I. Recently, scholars have analyzed Germany as the first postcolonial power to explore the material memory of the African colonies in Germany through the present. However, a small Weimar movement to restore the colonies persisted, despite faltering in the early 1920s. This chapter is most concerned with exploring the active continuities with the past, especially Weimar Germans’ efforts to sustain and revive German settlement in South West Africa through state-promoted biopolitics. The German postwar colonial movement drew its most ardent supporters from the ranks of former Wilhelmine colonial officials, troops, and settlers who sought a restoration of the colonies to Germany from direct self-interest. After the Armistice in 1918, the Colonial Society was greatly reduced in power, but remained the premier organization in terms of membership

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and funding through 1932, and so was the most important pressure group for the return of the German colonies. Only in the mid-1920s did a gradual uptick in popular colonialism reemerge, thanks to German conservatives’ and nationalists’ growing demands for the reinstatement of the former overseas empire, especially the lands of the former colony in South West Africa. The campaign grew by the late 1920s, coalescing with the key German rallying cry demanding additional foreign territory as elbow room for its population (Lebensraum) among the radical nationalist parties in the later Weimar era, notably Hitler’s German National Socialist Party (NSDAP).3 During the turmoil in Germany of the early postwar years, the colonial movement declined as a range of rival populist nationalist movements in Weimar siphoned members from the Colonial Society and Women’s League. A host of new pro-imperialist splinter organizations emerged to serve the particular needs of former settlers, veterans, and other interest groups, further weakening the Colonial Society. Of course, the league also assumed greater independence after 1920, maintaining both nominal connections to the Colonial Society as well as cooperating with some of its work. The many German colonialist organizations in the early 1920s focused their main attentions toward the welfare of the German community in South West Africa, the only former German colony where settlers remained from the prewar era. Deploying internationalist liberal rhetoric, they pushed for a referendum in which German settlers’ self-determination might restore the territory to German control.4 The fractured Weimar colonial movement connected loosely through an umbrella organization advising the government on colonial policy, the Koloniale Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft (Colonial Working Group [of the German Empire]), founded in 1922, which included the league. Following the death of the Colonial Society’s longstanding president, Johann Albrecht of Mecklenburg, in 1920, Theodor Seitz, former governor of German South West Africa, led the Colonial Society and headed the Colonial Working Group. The German Foreign Ministry gave little attention to the former colonies in the early postwar era, while the German Colonial Ministry ceased operations altogether with the loss of the colonies. After 1920 state authority for colonial affairs resided in the newly formed Central Colonial Administration housed within the Ministry for Reconstruction, an office that primarily handled restitution claims for lost colonial property. In April 1924 when influential foreign minister Gustav Stresemann of the nationalist DVP reestablished a Colonial Affairs Division in the German Foreign Ministry, his move proclaimed German intentions to pursue a foreign policy of colonial revanchism, as reflected in a wave of state-funded propaganda designed to ignite and channel popular German colonialism toward lobbying the international community of nations for the return of German colonies.5 Despite these efforts, the situation for Germans who remained in the mandate remained uncertain after the war.

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The Insecurities of the German Population in the South West African Mandate In the immediate postwar era, the Colonial Society offered some practical assistance and a few loans to former German settlers eager to reestablish themselves in South West Africa, but high wartime prices followed by rampant postwar inflation wiped out their organization’s treasury, and exhausted any remaining subsidies for overseas resettlement by 1921. As fare prices in gold-backed British pounds grew unaffordable, ticketing agencies no longer even accepted German marks.6 The Colonial Society was far less wealthy or influential in the Weimar era than in the Wilhelmine period. Nor could the league longer rely on the Colonial Society’s lost largesse. When in 1920 the league’s Lüderitzbucht chapter proposed resuming transporting German girls and women to South West Africa as quickly as possible, the organization’s board of directors declined regretfully from financial embarrassment.7 Moreover, resettlement to South West Africa was risky because the future of the German population there stood in the hands of their opponents in the war, the Union of South Africa. In 1919 South African administrators carried out involuntary repatriations of resident German officials and soldiers, as well as many settlers. Together with the voluntary return of hundreds of German civilians, many of whom were in dire straits due to property losses during the conflict, deportations reduced the 1919 German population of the territory to only 5,918 from a prewar number surpassing 12,000.8 Census reports from the mandate era are spotty; they distinguished broadly between the categories of Europeans and Africans, but did not always differentiate between ethnic groups, as table A.5 in the appendix illustrates. As the data reflect, on 1 January 1921, in the first mandate census, the territory’s German population stood at 7,853, but the immigration of other white ethnicities to the mandate, particularly Afrikaners, was rising. The sex ratio of whites in 1921 also was skewed in favor of 11,242 men (58 percent) to 8,190 women (42 percent). Informal estimates further suggest that, in 1921, only about 750 German-owned small holdings and farms were still in operation from the prewar era, many having been looted or destroyed during the conflict. For the first two years of the mandate, the Union of South Africa restricted entry to those Germans who could demonstrate existing property or other means of support in the territory.9 Drought and postwar recession in the early 1920s distressed the local economy, which was largely reliant on agricultural exports. As global food prices fell after the war, the decline also undermined many German settlers’ security. Gradually, however, German diplomatic efforts won greater cultural autonomy for German residents in the mandate. An October 1923 agreement forged between Germany and Britain granted protections and tolerance for the official use of the German language in South West Africa, including state subsidies for the German schools

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and other public institutions, as well as admission for German immigrants without prejudice. Thereafter, immigration guidelines matched those of the Union of South Africa, barring only the indigent, criminals, prostitutes, and the mentally and physically ill. Nonetheless, German women, especially servants, typically earned less than men. Thanks to the devastating impact of the war on the German economy that peaked in 1923 with hyperinflation in Germany, most unmarried women from Germany who may have wanted to settle in South-West Arica would have had difficulty demonstrating the economic means or prospective employment necessary for immigration.10 The 1923 London Agreement also granted automatic naturalization to those residents of the mandate who held European or American citizenship, making them citizens of the British Empire. (Curiously, their imperial citizenship was valid only in the territory of the Union of South Africa, and was not transferrable to the United Kingdom.) German nationals legally could maintain dual citizenship, and some diehard German nationalists rejected naturalized imperial British citizenship altogether. Municipalities conducted their own elections, based on property tax rolls. The South West Africa Constitution Act of 1925 established a civil administration, partly elected, but disenfranchised any German aliens who refused naturalization. The limited representative government took the form of an eighteen-member advisory legislative assembly. White male citizens elected twothirds of its members. The South African governor general in Cape Town directly appointed the remainder of the assembly as well as the mandate’s administrator. Despite these measures aimed toward inclusion of Germans in the governance of the mandate, the long-term aim of the South African leadership was to break down white ethnic differences in the territory and absorb resident Germans into the ruling white population. Although the stated purpose of the League of Nations mandate status was to prepare the territory’s African population for self-rule, from the start the government of the Union of South Africa aimed to annex South West Africa as a fifth province.11

South West African Germans’ Position in the Mandate Most historians characterize the aims of the South African administration in South West African as containment of the large and ethnically diverse African population through land dispossession and large-scale white settlement. Their goals required resident Germans’ cooperation in the face of overwhelming numbers of Africans. Mandate administrator Gysbert Hofmeyr warned in 1923, “In S.W.A. I should think one would be wise to be prepared for native unrest in one form or another.”12 In response to perceived political resistance, Hofmeyr brutally suppressed protests against taxes among the Bondelswarts and Rehoboth Basters in the early 1920s, deploying the South African air force to bomb them into submission and

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causing numerous casualties and deaths of unarmed civilians. Histories of colonial state-building in Ovamboland demonstrate official alliances with African leaders, to encourage the labor migration of young men but prevent the mobility of African women, but also reveal that high administrators failed to uphold Ovambo claims against at least one district official for disturbing levels of lawlessness, unrestrained violence, and sexual assault.13 White settlers in South West Africa perceived their numerical disadvantage against the Africans and voiced similar anxieties regarding potential insurgency. The mandate administration established a series of measures aimed at containing the majority African population: affirming the territory that formed the former German Native Reserves as homelands for the various African ethnicities, imposing strict policies against male Africans who engaged in migrant hunting or pastoralism through proclamations against what was termed “vagrancy and idleness,” and enacting pass laws for African men by 1922 that required a white employer’s permission for them to move about—a policy that many native administrators unofficially extended to African women as well. Police understaffing required white settlers to assist in surveillance and control of the African population, and by 1923 the administration even declared that resident white men were liable for mobilization as civilian defense. Calls in the German newspapers for a volunteer force characterized its chief purpose as protecting white women and children, particularly on isolated farms. Naturalizing German settlers as citizens of the Union of South Africa therefore offered administrators a strengthened bulwark of white male protection symbolically countering African unrest, as did policies aimed at attracting further immigration of whites from neighboring colonies.14 Indeed, the mandate policies lured many new settlers, particularly Afrikaners from neighboring Angola, Bechuanaland, and the Rhodesias, whose arrivals erased Germans’ majority status by 1926. In 1920 a mandate-run Land Settlement Program began to advertise farms for sale to immigrant white settlers. Conditions were loose: the program eventually required a minimum of £250 in capital as start-up funds for farms, which could include moveable property such as furniture or agricultural equipment. Afrikaans-speaking patriarchs with large families from neighboring territories, many of them deeply impoverished, took advantage of these easy state subsidies to immigrate. Administrators openly remarked that their efforts to induce new Afrikaner settlement grew from their concern at the high ratio of white men remaining in depopulated German farming districts, and so aimed at stemming sexual liaisons between them and African women. They intentionally redirected resident young German men’s interests toward poor Afrikaner daughters, which alarmed many colonialist Germans who hoped that maintaining a separatist ethnic identity in South West Africa could restore the territory to German control.15 The South West African land-grant program to assist many economically marginal, and even nomadic, Afrikaner families to settle resulted in the high indebt-

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edness of white ranchers to the administration, the state Land Bank, and local merchants. Racial barriers for the program were strict: Africans, Asians, or biracial individuals could not participate or even sublet farmland from the program, and administrators warned that applicants discovered cohabiting with black women would forfeit their awards. Subsequent state efforts further discouraged interracial sexual unions; for example, in 1931 officials restricted the migration of Ovambo women from the Northern Reserves to the populous white settler districts in central and southern South West African despite the area’s famine and hardship. The administration also extended the Union of South Africa’s Immorality Act of 1927 to the mandate in 1934, a decree that criminalized extramarital sexual relations between whites and blacks. By 1938 native commissioners further discouraged African women’s contact with white men by requiring venereal disease examinations for passes to white urban centers, treating these women much like prostitutes.16 Collectively, these measures suppressed African women’s autonomy and mobility to discourage their sexual contact with white men. The increasing state surveillance in the South West African mandate against interracial sex and reproduction strongly discouraged casual sexual liaisons across racial lines, while white residents also reacted with greater social stigma against interracial cohabitation or legal unions. As these roots of the apartheid system slowly took hold in southern Africa, Germans and other white residents also increasingly pathologized African women as sources of disease, which diminished their perceived value as domestics.17 Instead, Germans who hoped to strengthen their community in South West Africa increasingly demanded additional immigrant German women to work as servants. They argued that assisting unmarried German women as domestics would provide necessary housekeepers to supervise black household help, as well as to be a source of potential brides to marry the many young German men working on farms in the mandate, who otherwise would marry the socially inferior daughters of poor, immigrant Afrikaner trekker families.

Persistent Fears of German Women’s Racial Defilement The Weimar state’s coordinated efforts to settle German women in South West Africa positioned them largely as prospective romantic or sexual rivals to Afrikaner daughters, not African women. The effort in no way signifies a lessening of German racism in the 1920s, as was particularly evident in the propaganda campaigns over the so-called Rhineland Horror newspaper campaign from 1919 to 1923, in which German nationalists and colonialists denounced sexual relations between German women and French colonial troops from Asia and Africa. These infamous Weimar protests in Western Germany condemned the postwar occupying French colonial African soldiers for their alleged coercion, rapes, and fraternization with

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white women, which had resulted in the births of dozens of biracial children in the Rhineland. German reactions drew on the racial stereotyping against mixed-race children from the prewar era, especially the Reichstag hearings of 1912 against the colonial marriage bans, but also reflected racialized psychological reactions against German defeat in the war and loss of its overseas empire and Great Power status. The campaign not only reflected acute postwar anxiety over race and women’s sexuality, but also a crisis of German masculinity.18 Paradoxically, however, in the 1920s colonial interest groups also courted the few colonial Africans resident in Germany as witnesses of German benevolence toward their former African colonial subjects and justification for the return of German rule in Africa. Indeed, some historians suggest that the loss of the German Empire shifted metropolitan anxiety over interracial reproduction from Africa to the homeland, so that German racism against blacks became pervasive, but unmoored it from its former connection to colonialism. The Third Reich’s colonial films further confirm this trend, appropriating Africa as a broad canvas in which to play out contemporary German nationalist, racist, and anti-Semitic stereotypes. Since popular images of Africa in the postcolonial era no longer represented orderly German-ruled space, these films could portray them as sites of direct racial conflict where heroic whites prevailed.19 However, colonialist leaders in Germany continued to voice alarm over the insurrectionary threat that African men represented toward white settlers in Africa, especially toward white women. Some also condemned the Rhineland Horror, referring to the French colonial troops occupying the postwar German Rhineland whose alleged rapes and fraternization with women in Germany had resulted in the birth of biracial children. The influential Heinrich Schnee, the former governor of German East Africa and president of the German Colonial Society from 1928 to 1930, vehemently deplored the French colonial troops’ role in the occupation of Germany. He particularly railed against the demeaning of white women’s status through their employment in French military bordellos serving colonial troops from Africa and Asia. Schnee also predicted the French treatment of its colonial troops as equals would threaten white rule in Africa, remarking, “The coloreds [Farbigen] returning to South Africa brought a number of French wenches [Weibern] home with them, and then over 10,000 colored unanimously protested for full civil and political equality with whites at a meeting held in Cape Town.” And so Schnee and others consciously argued that the French occupiers’ racial defilement of German women in the Rhine (Schwarzes Schmach) would fuel rebellion in colonial Africa, endangering white settler women.20 Schnee’s warning, republished widely in the German newspapers in South West Africa in 1923, demanded the rigid protection of white women’s honor as the key to maintaining racial hierarchy in southern Africa. White hypervigilance in the early 1920s and beyond continued to dictate heavy official surveillance of black men and harsh legal reactions against their perceived transgressions of white

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homes and public spaces. South West African courts were swift and severe when even allegations arose of improprieties of black men toward white women.21 So, Germans in South West Africa noted the Black Horror in the Rhineland as compounding evidence that underscored the vital necessity of elevating and protecting their women’s honor for preserving their racial prestige. Many Germans also questioned white women in the mandate for seemingly innocuous behaviors such as dancing in public to live music by African musicians: Those of us who were here before the war know that already at that time isolated incidents took place between white women and black men that were simply frightful (and to be sure at the instigation of the former!). Thus, [white women’s] dancing in the presence of native [musicians] until the early morning can in no way be allowed as a regular occurrence. Otherwise, we as whites would be at fault if later here there were attacks and assaults by blacks on white women and girls, as we once endured, and as are now no longer so rare in the Union of South Africa. There are truly already more than enough Mischlingsvolk [mixed race people] in the country.22 German settlers not only worried that the gaze of African men represented a racial danger to white settler women, but also even social contact with whites they perceived as inferior in genetic value such as Afrikaners, or the territory’s growing number of Jewish residents.23 As efforts to resume the former program to subsidize German women’s settlement in South West Africa picked up steam, these complicated notions about protecting the racial honor of white women exalted their symbolic significance both as culture bearers of German identity and their significance as the racial and eugenic vessels of the German Volk. As discussed below in more detail, if and when sponsored immigrant German women fraternized with men from other white ethnicities, particularly Afrikaner men, their fellow Germans also reacted in outrage toward these perceived betrayals.

Reviving German Women’s Sponsored Settlement Sponsored women’s colonization resumed after two prominent South West Africans approached Weimar Foreign Ministry in April 1925, urging new efforts to sustain the German majority in South West Africa after the influx of thousands of Afrikaners. They were August Stauch, famed as the man who first discovered diamonds in the territory in 1908, and August Schulze, a Swakopmund publisher. They urged efforts to subsidize German men as farmers, as well as women’s immigration as their prospective brides, calling for a renewal of the widely known prewar efforts for sponsored German women’s colonization. The local German

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consular agent Dr. Franz supported their proposals as well. Schulze also appealed to the Weimar government through the Reichsstelle für Auswanderungswesen (Reich Office for Emigration), a public bureau that provided information for prospective German emigrants, which directed much of their settlement within existing Germanic communities overseas. Its director was the prominent former deputy governor in South West Africa, Oscar Hintrager. The league also worked with his organization as part of their postwar advocacy of German women’s emigration in general.24 As a key figure in the Wilhelmine colonial bureaucracy, Hintrager had long supported German women’s subsidized settlement in the territory to discourage white settler men’s liaisons with African and biracial women. In addition, Schulze also contacted Colonial Society president Theodor Seitz and several noted colonial sympathizers in the foreign ministry in Berlin. The Colonial Society engaged in several private land-grant programs to encourage German farmers to emigrate. They openly disparaged prospective Jewish immigrants to the territory as undesirables, but also discouraged Germans who lacked sufficient capital for starting a farm. The Colonial Society readily assisted prospective German farmers of limited means by recruiting young men to emigrate and serve as unpaid “volunteers,” interning on existing ranches in South West Africa until they were ready to start their own. However, President Theodor Seitz declined further involvement from the Colonial Society in promoting women’s settlement efforts. By contrast, Hintrager persuaded the recently reestablished Colonial Division of the foreign ministry to subsidize prospective German brides to South West Africa, claiming they were needed to help German men in founding new farms. Hintrager warned that, without access to unattached German women, sponsored German men would marry resident Afrikaner women, many of whom already were familiar with local farming practices and skilled in many of the types of labor these enterprises required.25 Next, Hintrager approached the board of the league requesting they reorganize their former women’s settlement program. Unfortunately, the league was nearly moribund by 1925. Chair Hedwig von Bredow, who served between 1920 until her death in 1932, had struggled to revitalize the organization after former chair Hedwig Heyl’s resignation, particularly to reestablish its relevance in Germany’s postcolonial era. Between 1919 and 1926, the league still engaged in some limited, direct aid to German settlers still residing in South West Africa. As inflation crippled the organization, it was forced to withdraw much of its former charity for German settlers in Africa. Without this central purpose, member activism and donations declined over time. By 1925 the league had shrunk to only 6,500 members from a prewar high of more than 18,000, and held less than 5,000 marks in its treasury.26 The league’s chair, Hedwig von Bredow, with the league’s national board of directors, embraced the idea of promoting German women’s colonization in South West Africa once again, despite a dire lack of resources. For Hintrager, a govern-

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ment official, enlisting the league as the public face of Germany’s renewed female colonization effort in Africa remained crucial for preserving the impression that the program was a private initiative. He was seeking to avoid attention from the South African administration, which would have frowned on Weimar state support for German immigration in the mandate. For the sake of secrecy, Schulze requested that no official envelopes be used in the venture. Spurred by these overtures, the league and Hintrager successfully requested state funding for the planned German female colonization project in South West Africa from the Weimar administration in July 1926. Unfortunately, their secrecy has sometimes deceived future historians that the colonialist movement no longer worked in tandem with German colonialist officials. The stark reality that the SPD and communists had mobilized strong German anticolonialism in this era demonstrates another important antidemocratic intent behind the secret state subventions for colonial settlement and propaganda.27

The Decline and Rebirth of the Women’s League The decline of the league in the early 1920s directly reflected the shift in attention and resources to other Weimar political causes, which translated to a loss of assistance to the German community in Africa. In the South West African cities of Lüderitzbucht and Swakopmund, the respective chapters of the Women’s League and the renamed Frauenverein vom Roten Kreuz für Deutsche Übersee (Women’s Association of the Red Cross for Overseas Germans) struggled to maintain their municipal kindergartens with only local German clubwomen’s fundraising to sustain them. Meanwhile, in Windhoek, the numbers of German women were so reduced that the local chapters of both groups were forced to merge to avoid competition for limited donations. Operating after 1920 as the Windhoek Women’s Organization (Frauen Verein), these women served as the main charitable arm toward assisting local German citizens, who could no longer depend on the former largesse of the Women’s League. Many German residents in South West Africa lived in dire straits throughout the 1920s. In Swakopmund white residents made halting efforts to ally with British and Afrikaner clubwomen for local philanthropy, to the consternation of the existing local chapter of the Women’s Association of the Red Cross for Overseas Germans. In Windhoek charitable giving also followed clear ethnic lines; the English High Church held its ladies’ bazaar one week, and the German Lutheran Church the next. Nationalism pervaded these events, as German scouting groups performed for feted guests of honor visiting from Germany such as Hildegard von Leckow, head of the Women’s Association of the Red Cross for Overseas Germans. South West African Germans also regularly collected food and clothing donations for the needy in the homeland through much of the 1920s and early 1930s.28

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The German Foreign Ministry began to infuse cash toward reviving German colonialism in the wake of economic stabilization in Germany after 1925. State funding also allowed the Women’s League to expand its propaganda profile. In addition to traveling lectures, books, postcards, and pamphlets, a new, independent journal detailing their organizational efforts appeared in 1928, as well as a feature film Colonial Women’s Work (1930). A partnership with a German food company led to a joint cookbook and even the release of a second film, Unforgotten Country (1931) about the need for overseas colonies. A third film, African Travel Pictures (1932) highlighted German women and children in East Africa, detailing how the league’s charitable assistance to German settlers in East Africa expanded.29 In addition, foreign ministry grants assisted in the reestablishment of the moribund Colonial Women’s School. The school relocated to Rendsburg, Schleswig Holstein, and resumed classes in April 1927. The revived Colonial Women’s School, like its prewar predecessor, offered secondary education to female students including specialized training in colonial languages, horticulture, dairy, and skilled artisanal work. Indeed, historians have taken note that, during World War II and the Holocaust, some of the school’s graduates gravitated toward placements in Nazi-occupied settlements of German immigrants in conquered territories of Poland and Czechoslovakia. These numbers included German women students from South West Africa and other former colonies. The Weimar state also underwrote the school, since even with the support of the Women’s League the institute quickly would have failed by 1929. After the economic crash, the government underwrote 90 percent of the Colonial Women’s School budget. In 1928 alone the Women’s League awarded thirteen female students stipends to the school, mainly from in the former German colonies in Africa. Oddly, these students traveled to Germany for their education about the colonies.30 Still, in the postwar era, the Women’s League heralded the Women’s Colonial School as a key avenue for women’s preparation to settle overseas, as the organization also increasingly publicized its care and education of German youth as core missions. These efforts entailed organizing student and teacher exchanges between the former colonies and Germany, and the foundation of scouting organizations in Germany and abroad (known as the Pfadfindern or Pathfinders for boys and the Maiden Bund or Maiden League for girls), including several chapters in South West Africa. Germans who had fought in the South West African wars helped to organize the first German Pathfinders before World War I. The league had organized kindergartens and youth centers in South West African cities, but not scouting organizations in the prewar era. One measure of the Women’s League’s growing organizational identification with youth work was its new prominence in its propaganda; in descriptions of their mission, educational outreach, and exchanges, as well as their scouting movement, now took precedence over their support for women’s colonial settlement and employment, which had predominated Wilhelmine era annual reports and literature.31

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As the German Foreign Ministry expanded German schools in the former German colonies, their propagandists calculatedly publicized the plight of German schools in Africa to immigrant German communities abroad. In Newark, New Jersey, the visiting German admiral Jacobsen called on local German clubwomen, who hosted a charitable card party to benefit these schools. The local German newspaper reported, “The entire pioneering work of the previous 75 years will be lost to the German Fatherland, if the resident Germans are not allowed to offer their children a German upbringing and education; for a dollar a year anyone who holds this cause close to their heart can contribute by becoming a member of the German Colonial Society.” So, the Weimar state-driven propaganda campaign to foster German education in Africa served as a wedge to mobilize Germans abroad, including in the United States, to aid in the return of the German colonies. The Newark German club’s charitable card party earned them a dubious place in the league’s annual report, which hailed the organizers as founders of the first US chapter of the Women’s League.32 The deliberate obfuscation demonstrated how easily German radicals could exploit German women’s maternalist and charitable impulses for political ends.

Figure 8.1. “Deutsche Schulkinder in Karibib [in der Mitte Frau v. Bredow]” (“German Schoolchildren in Karibib ([Women’s League Chair Frau von Bredow in the middle]”). Publicity Photo of the Women’s League of the German Colonial Society, c. 1930. https:// sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/kolonialesbildarchiv/content/titleinfo/11465289 Courtesy of the Colonial Picture Archive, Goethe University Frankfurt/Main Library: urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-756744

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Enlisting German women for the care of German children in Africa also played to the maternalist-nationalism of women’s politics in Weimar. Under the Weimar constitution, German women were equal citizens who now enjoyed much greater social and economic opportunity, and many German women on the political right asserted their public role as mothers of the nation. The Wilhelmine popular discussions of importing German brides to South West Africa to discourage interracial relationships between German men and African women dissipated. After the 1920s German colonialists increasingly depicted such interracial unions as historical relics from the pioneer days in the colonies. German clubwomen in local chapters of the league now determined which settlers were racially and ethnically worthy of their assistance. Still, longstanding colonial administrator Oscar Hintrager propagandized about these female colonists’ eugenic roles as mothers: “She awakens her children to spiritual life and preserves the intrinsic German ethnic character [Völkstum] of the adolescent generation.” Increasingly, colonialist women’s political maternalism took the form of caring for German children in the colonies, and program records directed many sponsored settler women in South West Africa (and elsewhere) to positions in child care, education, and health care.33 These placements permitted German women to inculcate German language, customs, and identity among German settler children in Africa, which served the Weimar Foreign Ministry’s intention of establishing their enduring diasporic ties to Germany.

State Funding for Sponsored German Colonization in South West Africa Despite popular acceptance of German women as colonizers, Hintrager and his fellow bureaucrats’ attention stressed promoting large numbers of female migrants to South West Africa rather than discerning which qualifications immigrant German women most needed, as they did with male participants. This practice suggested their assumption that all German women were innately qualified to serve as domestics and teachers, not to mention as wives and mothers.34 Moreover, state funding for women’s emigration also was still far from equal to men; the Weimar state invested more than 6 million reichsmarks in creating land and mining opportunities for young men as farmers, artisans, and mineworkers in South West Africa through cooperation between the Colonial Society and the Reich Office for Overseas Emigration. They even supported a new venture of mining magnate August Stauch, the Overseas Mining and Industrial Company. By comparison, the Weimar Foreign Ministry directly invested only about 170,000 marks for women’s colonization to be spent strictly on their overseas passages, clearly regarding German women’s role as subsidiary. Historians note that the foreign ministry restricted the funds to women who were thirty-five and under, which they determined were

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still a marriageable age; however, this was a continuity with the past, as the Colonial Society had imposed restrictions on women above thirty in 1913.35 The South West African women’s settlement scheme fully depended on local employers coming forth with vacant positions for women, unlike the programs for German men that established training and positions for them, while women’s employment was rarely intended to provide them with secure careers or long-term professional skills. Many openings were for domestics, caregivers, hospitality workers, and clerical workers. The league’s reports on the welfare of participating women focused on their engagements and marriages, implying their labor was only a stop-gap until they could form ties with suitable German men. Unfortunately, when these public-private economic schemes in South West Africa for immigrant men to engage in mining, skilled craftwork, and agriculture failed after 1929 as a result of the Great Depression, the collapse left many of the participants and their newly founded families deeply in debt. A few of the graduates of the Colonial Women’s School also took placements in the mandate, though others who traveled to South West Africa were not in need of travel stipends, due to independent means or connections there. The director of the school later claimed that nearly 120 former students had migrated to South West Africa after 1930, but the figure does not make clear how many of them actually were exchange students from German settler families in Africa.36 Furthermore, archival records indicate that the first graduates had spotty and short tenures in Africa. The first two former students left Germany together in May 1928. The first, Elfriede Knapp, was twenty-three, “a fresh, capable, energetic young maiden who established the good reputation of the Colonial Women’s School out there.” She assumed a position as a ladies’ helper and gradually gained responsibility for teaching the eldest two sons of her employer. But the economic crash led her employers to give up their ranch due to severe income losses. Knapp regretted the “poor cohesion and manners” of the Southwest African Germans. She decided in March 1930 to return to Germany, although her employers had to borrow the funds to send her back.37 By contrast, Ruth Schumacher was about twenty at the time of her migration. Frida Voigts reported she was very unhappy within six months, complaining of poor treatment although she was “very competent and nice.” Her employers subsequently complained she was unreliable, but soon she was engaged to a young man. Then, she suddenly collapsed, allegedly from overwork, but soon was diagnosed with polio myelitis. The league paid for her return to Germany in 1930.38 These first two graduates were among many others who could not sustain themselves in the faltering South West African economy after 1928. The Weimar Foreign Ministry’s promotion of German colonization in South West Africa (and, to a lesser extent, in East Africa) again placed many participant settlers in precarious situations that resulted in their impoverishment and return to Germany. The situation echoed the prewar years, when German state support for female colonization in Africa at the turn of the twentieth century had been so

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controversial for its failure to ensure participants’ welfare that socialist and feminist spokespersons in the Wilhelmine period successfully had sought to limit state involvement and funding in the scheme. Despite orders to distance themselves, colonial officials in South West Africa had provided vital assistance to sponsored female servants, sometimes through subterfuge and secrecy. Likewise, in 1926 bureaucrats from the German Foreign Ministry contacted the German Finance Ministry seeking secretive special funding earmarked for colonial causes, remarking, “The importance of preserving and promoting Germandom [Deutschtum] in Southwest Africa is just in the course of the last few years recognized on your side through the provision of funding various special purposes. . . . The value of providing suitable women for the German settlers in South West Africa] with the view of retaining Germanness there can hardly be set high enough.”39 Not only did these moneys come from a severely constrained Weimar State, but also the initial allocations for colonization in 1926 came from funds appropriated for an entirely different cause: the War Reparations Budget, much of it owed to foreign victims from World War I.40 After 1927 Weimar state funding for female colonization became regularized, although it was still hidden within a foreign ministry budget allocation for colonial propaganda and organizations, which included extensive state funds to promote colonial propaganda among the German public for the restoration of the colonies. As Oscar Hintrager remarked, the settlement program fulfilled the appropriation’s intended purpose because “German blood and children’s cries in Southwest Africa are the best and most lasting colonial propaganda.” The league’s public literature makes no mention of the official source of the state funds for subsidized women’s and children’s fares to South West Africa and a smaller number to Tanganyika, where most were married or served in local German schools. (A few applicants even traveled to Angola, Kenya, Mexico, South Africa, and elsewhere.) As in the past, the Women’s League secured positions for many of the sponsored settler women. (See table A.6 in the appendix for a breakdown of the participants.) Grants for single women promised them secure employment in South West Africa, and the league prioritized placing graduates from the Colonial Women’s school. Many of these former students of the school and the other applicants as well came from genteel class backgrounds but were in strained circumstances. Enrolled students pursued specialized training in home economics, farming, teaching, and nursing. The league also used state funding to subsidize a small number of pupils to Germany as exchange students from South West Africa.41 Frida Voigts, who was by far the most prominent German woman in South West Africa, and who was the league’s district chair for the territory, remarked on the difficulty of maintaining the veil of secrecy while attempting to find suitable employment for prospective female colonizers: “Especially since I have to keep the matter here in the land under cover [unter der Hand] and can only make it known through the various German organizations. . . . To put this in the newspaper must

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be completely ruled out. Unfortunately, therefore, it will take a much longer time until all Germans are informed about these subsidies.”42 In 1926 the league immediately allocated promised state moneys to prospective female applicants. Once these funds were all granted, the league and Oscar Hintrager appealed for more from the Colonial Division of the foreign ministry and finance ministry. The German Foreign Ministry kept meticulous records of the program, but archival correspondence with the league ends after the disbursement of 1931.43 When the Nazi Party overthrew the Weimar state in 1933, the Nazi Foreign Ministry assumed further costs for promoting German women to Africa, but no archival records survive.

The Weimar Program German Women’s Colonization in South West African Weimar-era foreign ministry records make clear that the program foundered in the Great Depression. In 1932 only a small number of subsidized women migrated to join families in the mandate or as unpaid housewives’ assistants (Familientöchter). The league investigated carefully to ensure that the families of its aid recipients could not afford the fares themselves, and German women with genteel backgrounds but limited financial resources often became beneficiaries of this program while most truly impoverished women could not afford to provide a third of their fares to Africa or save to repay the loaned fares. Not surprisingly, following the economic crash the emigration program for prospective workers foundered from 1930 on, as applications dwindled from prospective employers in the mandate, which was hard hit in the Great Depression. From 1930 on, most of those who emigrated were the fiancées, wives, or female relatives of German settlers. As table A.6 in the appendix makes clear, more than four hundred women emigrated to Africa thanks to Weimar state aid by 1933, with a further two hundred individuals arriving between the Nazi takeover and the dissolution of the Women’s League in 1936. As the data reflect, German women interested in emigrating as workers typically arranged their own job placements in its early days, but the program gradually shifted toward recruiting more and more applicants to fill specific positions. The majority (about 70 percent) of the applicants settled in South West Africa, and an even larger segment of those were participating as sponsored employees.44

Assessing the Postwar German Women’s Emigration Program These data demonstrate that the Weimar female colonization movement shifted strikingly and decisively from the prewar program’s previous family centered focus toward fostering mainly single women’s colonization. Before World War I, unmarried women’s colonization had been highly controversial. Altogether, the Colonial

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Society’s prewar emigration program had sponsored more than 2,200 colonists to Africa, among whom about 700 were employees. However, the Colonial Society limited the role of the Women’s League to recruiting female workers for openings in South West Africa, though other recruitment programs such as Brakwater also had applicants.45 The league sent more women to the former colonies after 1926 than they had sent before World War I, and they offered occasional colonization subsidies to new destinations as well, including Angola, Mexico, and Kenya.46 However, the Colonial Society’s earlier female colonization program lasted longer and surpassed the Weimar program’s size. The most notable statistical difference in the Weimar era from the earlier program is that the league expanded sponsorship for independent German women to these areas, particularly as employees in South West Africa (and to a much lesser extent in other parts of Africa) now was nearly double the prewar period (from 31.5 percent to over 50 percent). The shift reflected the emphasis of the German Foreign Ministry whose officials urged the league to recruit unmarried settler women for South West Africa. However, only twenty-one (36 percent) of the postwar East African immigrants were unattached female employees. As before the war, the jobs for German women in South West Africa, although they included some clerical work and teaching positions, were often the least attractive employment, and were especially positions on isolated farmsteads in domestic service. After World War I more white settler households owned domestic amenities such as vacuums, washing machines, and other electrical appliances, and of course African domestics still were responsible for most heavy labor, assuming such help was available given continued postwar shortages of African labor.47 The Women’s League’s emphasis on recruiting German women for domestic and other rural employment in South West African was deliberate, as German women in the mandate were eager to abandon the African countryside to cities where white-collar positions offered them greater independence, pay, and social opportunities. As the district chair for the entire mandate Frida Voigts acknowledged, “Now, as before, the demand is great for travel subsidies for people from [South West Africa], who would like to have female relatives: nieces, sisters, or female friends, sent out through us. We had to reject many requests of this type in the past year due to a shortage of funds.”48 Her remarks indicate that as the economy tightened during the Depression, Germans sought the league’s assistance to bring female family members from Germany who could help shore up their households through their labor or financial support, but the organizers favored these unattached German women, perhaps because they were more likely to marry German bachelors. The expansion of single women workers’ opportunities to settle in South West Africa clearly meshed with the Weimar state’s interest in preventing young and struggling German settler men’s intermarriage with Afrikaner women, as well as prospective German employers’ interests in finding inexpensive female helpers for

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their homes, farms, and businesses. Moreover, the Weimar league may have focused on promoting unattached women’s colonization, despite the heavy requests from established settlers to assist their family members to emigrate, because it allowed the league to control the selection process and thus encourage women as settlers who fit their ideal of the settler wife and mother. In addition, the league’s efforts to control and supervise these sponsored female workers may have been aimed at preserving the reputation of their program, which had suffered so much negative publicity in South West Africa in the prewar era for the unruly behavior of some of their immigrant maids. The clubwomen in South West Africa took credit for caring for the newcomers and assisting them in acclimating in Africa.49 Even more striking than the increased rate of employment-oriented emigration is the program’s focus on assisting unmarried and unattached women for colonization; almost 65 percent of all the Weimar-era sponsored colonists (and approximately 70  percent of colonists headed to South West Africa) were unattached, rather than engaged or married, upon their arrival. The Colonial Society’s prewar settlement efforts had included significantly more married and engaged women before 1910. (Data from 1898 to 1910, shows only 36 percent of the Colonial Society’s prewar subsidized settlers were unattached (not counting immigrant dependent children). This concentration of single women as prospective settlers had always meant that some immigrant women would disappoint their employers by marrying shortly after arriving in South West Africa. In justifying state renewal of the program’s funding, Hintrager reported to the Colonial Ministry that 50 percent of the 181 single female immigrants since 1926 already were either engaged or married, and hoped their numbers would increase. These records also indicate that many of these women continued paid employment after marriage, which had been unusual for white women in South West Africa before World War I. As in the period before 1914, enumerations of sponsored migrants’ marriages and engagements served as evidence as success of the settlement scheme.50 The league strengthened its ties to its overseas members in South West Africa and, to a lesser extent, East Africa, relying on local German clubwomen to assume responsibility for overseeing subsidized German women after their arrival. Frida Voigts and other prominent league members in South West Africa also vetted prospective employers, which in turn expanded their social influence within their communities. Clubwomen greeted and mentored the newcomers, mediated between employers and workers, enforced the organization’s contracts, and provided assistance when problems arose. The league’s efforts reaffirmed the sense of importance among German women in the mandate and their enduring connection to the German metropole. League officers’ authority over the sponsored women also reinforced the class hierarchy of German women in the region. Organizers placed many of the new applicants, particularly those from cultivated backgrounds, into employments where they could spread German culture, especially childcare and education.51

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As Frida Voigts, the longtime leader of the league in South West Africa, proclaimed, in direct reversal of her prewar stance that simple maids were best: “Now. however, the farmer’s wife who needs a white helper seeks a strong and independent person, someone who can take over from her in supervising the natives; she also seeks someone who can offer something for her soul, someone who brings with her freshness and excitement from the old homeland that she hasn’t seen for years.”52 Voigts envisioned these new immigrant women were to learn the proper standards of the colonial wife and mother from the preceding generation, as they in turn brought their employers news, experiences, and stronger ties to German culture and society. Participant women who showed too much independence disrupted this intention. One report deplored how one woman, Else Thomas, made a “right boyish impression” at her ship’s departure, suggesting she sported liberated 1920s fashions and a bobbed haircut. Thomas clashed with her employer, and decided to travel from farm to farm as an independent seamstress to earn her livelihood; her independence and mobility caused consternation to Voigts and her fellow clubwomen until she married.53 Voigts regarded these newly arrived immigrant women as prospective future wives and supporters of the local German community as well as the league. Her correspondence with many of the participant women demonstrates her willingness to bond with them, most especially those from genteel backgrounds. Voigts, herself a pioneering settler who arrived around 1902, likely had little understanding of this postwar generation of self-reliant women from Weimar Germany. As before the war, the program’s organizers intended the majority of these Weimar immigrant women to come under the supervision of their German employers rather than becoming completely independent female colonists. At the annual meeting of the league in South West Africa in 1929, Voigts reported that 78 percent of the women employees under their supervision had proved to be outstanding (vorzüglich) in their conduct. She and the other Women’s League leaders in South West Africa were placed in a powerful position as judges of these women. Indeed, a new relationship had evolved in which the league’s representatives assessed both the suitability of immigrant women and the employers. Voigts further explained, “I prefer to take the ‘most difficult cases’ into my own home, to get to know the girls. They speak to me, and I understand them well enough to be able to judge where they would fit in.”54 The leading regional German clubwomen in the mandate like Voigts acted as agents who held confidence in their intimate knowledge of potential employees and employers. Their ability to consult with rank-and-file members to gauge German women’s reputations throughout the territory therefore conferred important power on them. I argue that the diasporic ties between these German clubwomen and the Weimar-funded Women’s League shifted much of the former state’s biopolitical policies into ostensibly private hands of these women, who doled out the resources from Germany to settler families who conformed to the German community’s established colonial race, gender, and ethnic princi-

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ples. They withheld funding from Germans who broke with them.55 But German women (and men) in the diasporic community also could bring these Germans to heel through gossip and scandal, and even assisted the most flagrant transgressors from the sponsored settlement movement to other colonies.

Reports on Sponsored Women’s Welfare Because German officials no longer administered the former German colony in South West Africa, local bureaucrats no longer were present to oversee or record information on German women’s settlement in the 1920s and 1930s. Therefore, unfortunately, the Weimar reports are incomplete compared to the thorough state records on the prewar sponsored emigrants. Private correspondence between Women’s League members, often based on hearsay, became the primary means of tracking the second generation of sponsored colonists who arrived between 1926 and 1931. (In 1931, archival records cease.) Regular league reports to the Weimar Colonial Ministry on rates of their immigrants’ marriages remained a key measure of the success of state support and justification for renewed funding. The ongoing intelligence on the sponsored immigrants, compiled by members residing in South West Africa, cannot offer the same long-term view as the Colonial Society’s records. The Weimar sources prove equally intriguing for different reasons. In particular, the Women’s League’s remarks on its immigrants and evaluations of them and their conduct reveal the persistence of gossip in South West Africa, and the importance of women’s reputation as a measure of fellow women’s social status. These documents offer the historian important insights into the values, behaviors, and character traits expected of colonial women, especially how these conform to the harsh realities of German settler women’s lives during difficult times. In the archival documents, we find a complex view of female colonists’ experiences in a new and uncertain era of women’s emancipation, economic hardship, and political unrest. Reports on the sponsored migrants’ welfare came through the Berlin league office, based on information from the mandate’s clubwomen. Local chapter heads, and Voigts in particular as the league’s district chair for South West Africa, arranged employment for women workers and cared for unemployed or otherwise distressed participant women. This institutional support was so attractive that some of the applicant women requested only the organization’s placement, without subsidy. As in the prewar era, the applicant had to provide proof of good health and a police testament of good conduct. The Women’s League chapters in Germany also continued to conduct confidential inquiries into each candidate’s past and the program accepted only those who enjoyed unblemished reputations.56 The periodic Weimar reports share some interesting features overall, including a certain self-awareness of the biases and prejudices involved in relaying gossip

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and character assessments of sponsored women. They often formulate their assessments as mere opinion or hearsay; organizers’ remarks became freer and often used stronger wording than the neutral language of prewar reports. Indeed, the reporters may have regretted their candor as too revealing, since Hintrager suggests in offering the official report on immigrants from 1929 to the foreign ministry in June 1930 that follow-ups were needed in problem cases, “The work of the Women’s League is successful. In this new overview, unpleasant assessments and news from the earlier list have been corrected in many cases in the supplement.” The supplemental information was likely a deliberate glossing over of former criticisms and candor about their recruits. Occasionally, one even finds such expurgated comments in the documents.57 Most of all, the postwar organizers wanted to boast of their successful colonists, whom they hoped would report on their happiness and progress themselves; some reports relate how the participants commented on their own lives, including their marital and work choices, experiences in the mandate, and place in the larger German community. Especially where immigrant employees are concerned, the South West African reports on immigrant welfare provide the most complete information about their trajectories. Many of their disclosures can be characterized as gossip because they share personal information about an individual who was known to the Berlin audience, and offered a judgment about her.58 About 21 percent of the entries depict an individual in wholly unfavorable terms; completely positive assessments appear in about 43 percent. Another 10 percent of the immigrants’ records mixed positive and negative assessments. The entries on the remainder—slightly more than 25  percent contain no personal information—chiefly when the sponsored individuals were untraceable. As in the prewar era, once women were married reports largely presumed their well-being. The local Women’s League membership network in South West African was best informed about local employees. Their positive evaluations of participating immigrant workers in South West African typically describe their best qualities in much the same terms as the ideal, einfache (simple) maids of the Wilhelmine era: capable, nice, orderly, of good character, faultless, satisfied, and hardworking (tüchtig, nett, ordentlich, gute Charakter, tadellos, zufrieden, and fleißig). Unkind personal remarks were more diverse, and ranged from accusations of drunkenness, lack of skill, and stupidity, to calling a woman ugly. Organizers regarded Anneliese von Houwald, for example, though the daughter of a noble, as unemployable, unmarriageable, and irremediably miserable: “Her lack of household experience and education is always very unpleasantly noticeable. . . . The girl is an Unglückswurm [sad wretch], ugly and unskilled.”59 Perhaps they drew such conclusions unfairly, because the authors of the reports resided in a community where public opinion sized up newcomers rapidly as valuable or not valuable additions to the community; their gossip tended to attribute newly arrived women’s eventual trajectories to their personalities and behavior.

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In these narratives, then, female virtue and hard work brought rewards, while their opposites resulted in personal discontent. Most of the gossip about female employees contained in these sources centered on character assessments (19 percent) and quality of work (17 percent). Judgmental personal remarks about individuals that primarily dealt with their sexual relations and/or romantic love appear in only 12 percent of the records, although these comments were often among the most vicious. Even when a sponsored settler with an unsympathetic personality married—a desirable outcome—the reports still took a disapproving tone if she offended local moral standards. South West African Germans sometimes labeled independent women who were eager to advance themselves as adventuresses, especially self-serving women who broke up existing marriages or otherwise offended the German sense of community.60 Women who were unwilling to make sacrifices or subordinate themselves to their employers often became outcasts, but the shunning may have been mutual. However, when necessary, clubwomen in South West African could draw on sufficient funds and key political allies to rescue immigrant women from great difficulties. The national Berlin office of the Women’s League cabled the benevolent colonial German Association in Windhoek and the city’s German consulate seeking aid for one destitute woman, rather than allow her to damage their reputations by cohabiting with a married man. Although the consulate ultimately was not able to help her to sue her employers for back wages, Frida Voigts finally found her a more satisfactory job, and she subsequently became engaged to a “very nice man from Usakos.”61 This conclusion was a far more desirable one from the local clubwomen’s viewpoint, and it permitted the woman in question to continue to participate in good standing in the German community.

Gossip Though Voigts made clear that much of the gossip in South West Africa remained empty “African stories,” even the most careful selection and checking of references of women applicants for South West Africa could not prevent some women from straying. Voigts believed that flirting during the ship passage led some women to lose their sense of purpose, so they “arrived here completely different than they left Germany.”62 When these women disappointed the clubwomen in South West Africa, however, the loss of favor with the German community had important material implications. For several female immigrants the withdrawal of the local settler community’s goodwill and assistance meant the difference between poverty and sufficiency. The clubwomen in South West African sometimes championed unexpected causes in their support. Even when Katharine B. allegedly bore her married employer an illegitimate infant, a number of local league members stood by her

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through vicious local gossip, and Frida Voigts twice found new employment for her that included a home for the baby. The local colonial housewives were clearly jealous of employing her around their husbands: “She would be met everywhere with suspicion because of her illegitimate child.” Frida Voigts exerted herself to find the woman a fresh start as housekeeper in neighboring Angola with a widower. Her friend and fellow traveler Susanne von der O. was even more unfortunate: “The women of Omaruru say the worst things about her. There was serious talk of having her deported. Already onboard [ship] she behaved badly.” After the grapevine reported that she had broken up an established married couple and was named in their divorce, she also came between an engaged pair. Community pressure eventually seems to have forced von der O. to marry her first conquest, a much older, divorced man. She had few other options, since her unsavory reputation made her future employment improbable and even securing housing difficult.63 As Voigts complained, “The whole country talks about the sixteen failures, but nobody about the sixty-seven really good ones.”64 Much as in the Wilhelmine era, Voigts and her fellow leaders struggled to maintain their organization’s good reputation in the face of settlers’ gossip. Of course, the same women were completely unsympathetic about women who became involved with Afrikaner men, whom they saw as betraying German national interests. For example, Annamarie Wildermann “acquired a truly bad reputation. She went riding with Boer policemen and danced in Boer pubs, where no decent girl entered, and partied there at night.” Clearly, to Voigts, such tawdry behavior of women who fraternized with Afrikaners deserved their comeuppance. She and other such women typically migrated to neighboring African colonies after the German community in South West Africa ostracized them.65 Individual clubwomen sometimes made things harder rather than easier for some recent arrivals. Liselotte Engelmann immigrated in 1929 to join her fiancé in Keetmanshoop, only to face his disapproving missionary parents in Keetmanshoop. She was far from pleased with the local clubwomen’s treatment: “Furthermore, she complains about the ladies of the Women’s League, who all look down on her because her mother-in-law gave her a bad name, and the pastor also is unfriendly to her.”66 Although the path was smoother for women in settler families, tensions within one’s household soon could render a woman homeless and friendless. When Engelmann and other immigrant dependents faced gossip about their immorality (Unsittlichkeit) from relations, their reputations were ruined throughout the community, too. If prominent members of the German community rejected a newcomer on moral grounds, the league could withdraw all further grants and supports. So, Anna Lützke, who in 1929 traveled to Okahandja to live with her aunt, a midwife, was “chased away by her relatives for vice” in March 1930, but when her mother in Germany applied to the league to send the poor girl home, Berlin organizers denied her a return fare, remarking, “The Women’s League did not choose this girl and is not answerable.”67 Conversely, some women rejected the

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league’s friendly overtures outright. Organizers remarked that the hairdresser Friedel Müller Pump wrote an “impertinent letter” to them requesting the league leave her in peace, after receiving a book from the Wiesbaden chapter at Christmastime in a general mailing. Of course, the hostility was apparently mutual, since league reports cited Müller’s reputation for “chasing men” and harped on her precipitous marriage after only four days’ acquaintance with her groom.68 Some of the other sponsored women eventually joined local chapters of the league in South West Africa, particularly those who were immigrant wives and relatives rather than workers.69 Connections among graduates of the Colonial Women’s School also remained an important and enduring tie. Many of these former students were often women from middle class or higher backgrounds. Those who migrated overseas seem to have been able to integrate closely into many of their host families and to have received exceptional treatment from employers and members of the league. These women transitioned most readily as the social and economic elites of South West Africa. The enduring relations that were forged between the Women’s League, Colonial Women’s School graduates, and prominent clubwomen like Voigts in South West Africa also forged a loose network of mutual values and goodwill.70 As the following chapter indicates, the Nazi Party’s takeover brought a deepening of ties between colonialist women in Germany and South West Africa. A number of other sponsored migrants expressed disappointment with the German community in South West Africa, especially those who did not enjoy a so-called close family connection with their employers. Under such circumstances, employment could be very isolating and lonely indeed. Class distances between employer and employee likely were a source of many of these immigrants’ feelings of solitude, especially since the league continued placing many of its immigrant workers on distant farms. Others found the climate oppressive, such as governess Karla Bortfeld, who “found it hard in the beginning to get used to African circumstances. . . . On the farm, she finds it very lonely, hopes however to accustom herself to it.”71 Assessments of German women’s temperamental and physiological unsuitability for colonial circumstances often seem to blur in these discussions. As in many other European empires, widespread notions circulated among South West African Germans that some whites had difficulty acclimating to tropical and subtropical climates, perhaps indications of hereditary weaknesses that Nazi organizers later sought to root out of their selectees—as the following chapter also details. Despite such problems of adjustment, most of these reports indicate that sponsored migrants had proved themselves highly adaptable as settlers. Women who embraced nationalist political views of colonization occasionally lamented that other colonial Germans fell short of their ideals. One genteel immigrant, Margarethe Menge, reportedly “regrets only that Africa is already so civilized.” Marie Morgenstern, a twenty-six-year-old woman who arrived as a household assistant in 1927 in Keetmanshoop, enjoyed the highest praise of all. Her employers wrote to Oscar Hintrager himself to proclaim, “Through such girls will the young German

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men be drawn to German families and not associate with Boer families. . . . In the best sense, she is a pillar of Germanness. Sunshine of the household. Distinguished, stable, loyal to her duty, modest, indispensable. Is not sorry to have come to Africa.” Morgenstern settled in Bethanien after marriage and gave birth to at least two children. Still, her employer reported “often about the couple, whom he especially values as the best Germans of the district.” Despite enjoying a high profile in South West Africa as a German success story, however, Morgenstern and her husband returned to Germany in 1931, as the deep debt they incurred on their farm became untenable during the Great Depression.72 Although she and other such exceptional women enjoyed unusually positive reputations, their accomplishments, particularly as colonial housewives, also clearly served the needs and designs of the German Colonial Ministry to recruit Weimar women as German wives and mothers for the mandate.

Conclusions As this chapter has examined, after World War I the Women’s League could not afford to resume women’s settlement in South West Africa and languished as an organization. Economic and political conditions for German settlement in the former colony also were shaky before 1923. Mandate administrators encouraged German settlers to integrate with other whites, in part due to concern over African political resistance or independence struggles. Officials called on German settler men’s chivalry as volunteer reservists ready to suppress rebellious Africans. Mandate authorities also imposed restrictions against white men’s sexual contact with African women, while German community pressure limited the mobility of settler women and their interactions with African men. Historians conclude that German settlers played an active role in consolidating the South African colonial state in postwar South West Africa. However, German settlers declined in political power, since the mandate attracted rising numbers of Afrikaner immigrants with easy land-grants for whites-only. After the Afrikaner population surpassed them, Germans grew concerned at their minority status and hardened themselves against the possibility that young German men would marry the increasing numbers of potential Afrikaner brides. Germans in South West Africa and Germany therefore began pushing for the resuscitation of sponsored women’s settlement from Germany in 1925. Their justifications drew on the growing power of German eugenic and biopolitical arguments that claimed German mothers would help retain the innate Völkstum (German essence) of their offspring to preserve the Germanness of the population in South West Africa and lobby for its eventual restoration to Germany. The Women’s League blossomed not only from Weimar state funding, but also because state validation and support lent a renewed sense of purpose for resuming

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German women’s settlement. These changes quickly revived the Women’s League. From 1926 on the league recruited hundreds of single German women to resume sponsored emigration to South West Africa. The program continued into the Nazi era, though archival records are lacking. Some of these German settler women established model German homes and families; even then, many could not make a go of it in South West Africa during hard times of the 1920s and early 1930s. As before World War I, the league’s female colonization program sought women who would marry eventually. But migrant workers had to fulfill their contracts first, because if they pleased their employers and the community at large, the league would receive renewed applications for more female migrants. As before the war, state settlement subsidies may have encouraged economically marginal German men and women to emigrate to South West Africa only to fail from misunderstanding of local conditions, debt, and insufficient capital. The league reported on the welfare of its sponsored women, and the authors of these reports often gossiped about their charges’ character and behavior. The contents of these documents demonstrate the postwar continuation of class tensions and cultural differences between German residents in South West Africa that existed during the colonial era. German women’s reputations remained the source of constant community commentary in the Weimar era, perhaps even more so than before World War I. Although white settlers’ expectations of female chastity and honor embedded in the gossip embraced established middle-class German values, the many female misbehaviors that became targets of their talk suggest that working-class women’s reproductive strategies including common-law marriage, premarital sex, and out-of-wedlock births continued unabated in postwar South West Africa, especially during challenging economic times. Indeed, the rise of the so-called new woman in the German metropole meant that even middle-class women’s sexuality was less constrained among newly arrived women of the younger generation.73 Still, the harshest gossip and condemnation targeted women who allegedly broke up existing relationships or who became involved with Afrikaners. In Weimar-era propaganda, Women’s League members in Germany and South West Africa articulated a vision of the ideal German settler woman, and through disbursing state subsidies for female immigrants, they contributed to its realization along narrow, nationalist and racial lines. Ultimately reports from the 1920s and 1930s make clear that the Women’s League became more selective in its choice of prospective migrants, and now oriented their program toward assisting greater numbers of genteel women toward settling in South West Africa. Voigts and her clubwomen especially prized potential immigrants from cultivated backgrounds who seemed to sympathize with the organization’s mission or in some way identified with the radical-nationalist German colonial movement, particularly the Women’s Colonial School graduates. The league’s work and spread of its ideology in South West Africa had unforeseen consequences after Nazism took hold in Germany. By providing the diasporic Ger-

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mans in the former colony with potential German wives and mothers, and by supporting the German school system and spreading German language propaganda, the league helped to feed the birth of an irredentist German identity in the 1920s and 1930s in South West Africa. The following chapter details how these efforts laid the groundwork for mobilizing support for National Socialism among a vocal minority of Germans in South West Africa.

Notes 1. Andrea Süchtig-Hanger, Das “Gewissen der Nation”: Nationales Engagement und politisches Handeln konservativer Frauenorganisationen, 1900 bis 1937 (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 2002), 152–56, discusses the irrelevance of the organization in the early 1920s and the remarkable resurgence of the Women’s League. 2. Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Nachlaß 37, Oscar Hintrager. Clipping of his article, “Das Mischehen-Verbot von 1905 in Deutsch-Südwestafrika,” Afrika-Nachrichten 22 (Feb. 1941): 18, describes the renewal of funding. General histories of the mandate era include Maynard W. Swanson, “South West Africa in Trust, 1915–1939,” in Britain and Germany in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule, ed. Prosser Gifford and William Roger Lewis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967) 631–47; and Hayes et al., Namibia under South African Rule, which provides a detailed history of South West African Africans under the harsh Native Reserves system of the mandate. See “Die Verteilung unserer Liebesgabe für Deutschland,” LZ (3 Oct. 1924) on donations to Germany. On the struggles of the early 1920s and reaching the largest membership of colonial organizations, see Venghiattis, “Mobilizing,” 290–96. Membership comparison with Colonial Society Klaus Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich: Hitler, NSDAP, und koloniale Frage, 1919–1945 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1969), 53–54 (note 62), and 101. 3. Marcia Klotz, “Weimar Germany: A Post-Colonial State in a Still-Colonial World,” in Ames, Klotz, and Wildenthal, Germany’s Colonial Pasts, 135–47; Britta Schilling, Postcolonial Germany: Memories of Empire in a Decolonized Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Sean Wempe, Revenants of the German Empire: Colonial Germans, Imperialism, and the League of Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). David Blackbourn argues that the end point of the German colonial empire was the dissolution of the German settlements in Central and Eastern Europe, “Das Kaiserreich transnationale. Eine Skizze,” in Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt, 1871–1914, ed. Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2006), 324. 4. Wolfe Schmolkel, Dream of Empire: German Colonialism, 1919–1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964); Sean Wempe, “Lost at Locarno? Colonial Germans and the Redefinition of ‘Imperial’ Germany, 1919–1933” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2014), esp. 29–30 on colonialists’ appropriation of internationalist rhetoric. 5. Smith, German Colonial Empire, 232–33. Schmolkel, Dream of Empire, 8–10, outlines the Weimar colonial movement and names some of the many Colonial Working Group constituent members beyond the Colonial Society and Women’s League. 6. The contents of the archival files DKG 180–81 indicate the Colonial Society collected inquiries and forwarded names of those interested in re-emigrating to the Ministry for Reconstruction’s colonial division, Reichsministerium für Wiederaufbau, Kolonialzentralverwaltung. They advised colonists when ships would depart and about the formalities on the Union of South Africa permits for immigration in South West Africa, as well as assisting former colonials seeking war reparations. Interest-free loans for up to half the fare, repayable within five years, exhausted the philanthropic treasury to rebuild the former colonies

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7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

(Johann-Albrecht-Spende) by Dec. 1921 (DKG 181, 39). Eventually, the cost of the fare grew to 10,000 marks, outside the means of most Germans. Returning settlers faced uncertain futures: the Rückwanderer-Hilfsfonds of the Reichsverband der Kolonialdeutschen, 1923, referred to economic conditions in the territory that made it very risky to travel out without first securing work. RKA 1197, 103–04, die VorstandsSitzung des Frauenbundes der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft am 20. November 1920, Anträge. Wallace, History of Namibia, 205–7; DKG 181, 4, 8. Swanson, “South West Africa in Trust,” 633, 650, fn65, offers the figure of 6,374 repatriations including 1,619 German military personnel, 1,226 officials, 873 police, 1,223 marked as undesirables, and 1,433 voluntary repatriations in 1919. Paul Barth, Südwestafrika. Wirtschaftlicher Ratgeber und allgemeine Anleitung, besonders für Auswanderungslustige (Windhoek: John Meinert Ltd., 1926), 198, estimates the numbers of operational German farms in the territory. The sex ratio appears in a report on the census: SZ (23 June 1923). One of the Women’s League’s immigrant Weimar maids found herself faced with threats of deportation after two years’ residence, when local emigration authorities belatedly demanded the usual required deposit of 40£ from her as proof of her solvency; see RKA 1198, 141 and 343. Wallace, History of Namibia, 238–39; Robert Love Braum, ed., Southwest Africa under Mandate: Documents on the Administration of the Former German Protectorate of Southwest Africa by The Union of South Africa under Mandate of The League of Nations, 1919–1929 (Salisbury, NC: Documentary Publications, 1976), 110–12. Swanson, “South West Africa in Trust,” 646. Germans also banded together in a quasi-political organization ostensibly to promote German culture, known as the Deutsche Bund für Südwest Afrika (German Association for Southwest Africa, or German Association), discussed further in the next chapter. Quote from G.R. Hofmeyr, “The Native and Changes in S.W.A.,” Cape Times, 21 Mar. 1923, printed in Braum, Southwest Africa, 88. Swanson, “South West Africa in Trust,” 655–56; Andries M. Fokkens, “The Suppression of Internal Unrest in South West Africa (Namibia) 1921–1933,” Scientia Militaria 40, no. 3 (2012): 109–46; Patricia Hayes, “‘Cocky’ Hahn and the ‘Black Venus’: The Making of a Native Commissioner in South West Africa, 1915–1946,” in Gendered Colonialisms in African History ed. Nancy Rose Hunt, Tesse P. Liu, and Jean Quataert (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 42–70. “Aufruf an die deutschen Landsleute,” SZ no. 40 (4 Apr. 1925); Gordon, “Vagrancy.” Jeremy Silvester, “Beasts, Boundaries and Buildings: The Survival & Creation of Pastoral Economies in Southern Namibia, 1915–1935,” in Hayes et al., Namibia under South African Rule, 95–107. In 1950, the law was extended to prohibit extramarital sex between whites and other races as well. Silvester, “Beasts, Boundaries and Buildings”; Marcia Wallace, “A Person Is Never Angry over Nothing: Women, V.D., & Windhoek,” in Hayes et al., Namibia under South African Rule, esp. 85–87; Patricia Hayes, “The ‘Famine of the Dams’: Gender, Labour and Politics in Colonial Ovamboland, 1929–30,” in Hayes et al., Namibia under South African Rule, 141. Wallace, “A Person Is Never Angry,” 85–87. Wigger, Black Horror; Campt, Other Germans, esp. 35–52; Julia Sneeringer, Winning Women’s Votes: Propaganda & Politics in Weimar Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 68; Julia Roos, Weimar through the Lens of Gender: Prostitution Reform, Woman’s Emancipation and German Democracy, 1919–33 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 193. Tina Campt, Pascal Grosse, and Yara-Colette Lemke-Muniz de Faria, “Blacks, Germans and the Politics of Imperialist Imagination, 1920–60,” in The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy, ed. Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Suzanne Zantop (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 206–17; Sabine Hake, “Mapping the Na-

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20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

31.

tive Body: On Africa and the Colonial Film in the Third Reich,” in Friedrichsmeyer, Lennox, and Zantop, Imperialist Imagination, 163–88. Quote from Heinrich Schnee, “Die Rassenfrage,” SZ no. 114 (15 Dec. 1923). Another German colonial periodical reported that South West African and South African Germans appealed to General Smuts to oppose the “black horror on the Rhine,” as reported in “Südafrikanische Nachrichten,” Koloniale Rundschau (1921): 286–93, remarked on 292. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 32–34, remarks on an overarching pattern in which European women’s colonization in greater numbers as a source of increased racial tension and segregation. However, no rape charges ensued; in 1932 Judge Bok noted as he passed sentence in the first trial that the case was the first attempted African rape of a white woman in the territory. “High Court Criminal Session,” WAd no. 1341 (5 Nov. 1932). Quote from “Zur Ehre der deutsche Frau,” LZ 16, no. 17 (21 Jan. 1928). Equally blatant anti-Semitism in German colonialist circles also was evident in 1929 when the German Colonial Society warned the Women’s League that the third-class compartments on ships to South West Africa that their female emigrants used were “overfilled with Galician Jews.” in BAP, DKG 153, 63RS, former Governor Seitz, president of the Colonial Society, 13 June 1929 to Agnes von Boemcken. RKA 1197, 3ff. Schulze to Geh. Reg. Rat A. Heiligenbrunner, foreign ministry, 19 Apr. 1925. Walther, Creating Germans Abroad, 119–24. Ausschuß-sitzungsbericht, 30 Aug. 1920 and v. 6 Oct. 1920, fol. 54; “Zum Jahreswechsel an unsere Mitglieder, Abteilungen und Gauverbände,” Der Kolonialdeutsche (1921): 12; “Der Frauenbund und seine Arbeit,” Der Kolonialdeutsche (Aug. 1924): 148; Boemcken, “Aus dem Geschäftsbericht von 1925,” Der Kolonialdeutsche (June 1925): 280, reports the placements of a few women in South West Africa without travel stipends. See Venghiattis, “Mobilizing,” 285, on membership figures and treasury, which dropped severely during the hyperinflation. RKA 1197, 3-14 Schulze to Geh. Reg. Rat A. Heiligenbrunner, foreign ministry, 19 April 1925 in Abschrift to Hintrager, 28 Apr. Wildenthal, German Women, 177–78. On the strong anticolonial opposition to public colonialist agitation in the Weimar era, Christian Rogowski, “Heraus mit unseren Kolonien! Der Kolonialrevisionismus der Weimar Republik und die ‘Hamburger Kolonialwoche’ von 1926,” in Kundrus, Phantasiereiche, 243–62. “Liebesgaben für Deutschland,” LZ (25 Oct. 1922); “Swakopmunder Opferwille,” SZ (18 Aug. 1923); “Lokales,” SZ (8 Sept. 1923) reports on the formation of an inter-ethnic charitable organization for the poor, which the local Frauen Verein convened to discuss. “Kirchenbazar,” SZ (12 Sept. 1929). Venghiattis, “Mobilizing,” 329–32. Elizabeth Harvey, Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Willeke Sandler, “Colonial Education in the Third Reich: The Witzenhausen Colonial School and the Rendsburg Colonial School for Women,” Central European History 49, no. 2 (June 2016): 181–207; RKA 1197, 321 Bericht von Frau Voigts, from her address to the Frauenbund general assembly for South West Africa in Windhoek 17 and 18 Oct. 1929. (Cited below as Bericht von Frau Voigts). Ausschuß des Frauenbundes der Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, 10 Jahre Frauenbund identifies female emigration assistance for unmarried women first in the outline of their organization’s activism (p. 14). The Frauenbund Annual Report (1929–30) initially describes other philanthropic efforts: the establishment and support of German schools and dormitories in Africa, exchange scholarships for colonial Germans, and cooperation with the Colonial Women’s School in Rendsburg. Only then does the Frauenbund mention its work fostering women’s colonial emigration and employment (p. 6). Though Germany had Pfadfinder troops formed before World War I, German colonial organizations did not sponsor them. Jeff Bowersox, Raising Germans in the Age of Empire: Youth and Colonial Culture, 1871–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). The league announced the founding of a Berlin

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32.

33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

46.

youth group for hiking, rhythmic gymnastics, and other activities in April 1926, Der Kolonialdeutsche (1926): 124), and organized its first youth scouting groups in 1930, Koloniale Frauenarbeit (1931), 10. Quoted from “Was in deutschen Vereinen vorgeht: Karten-Nachmittag heute, den 4. März zur Erhaltung des Deutschtums in den Kolonien,” New Jersey Freie Zeitung 4 Mar. 1930. Koloniale Frauenarbeit (1930), 30 chapter listings. Wildenthal, German Women, 177–78; quotation, Oscar Hintrager, who also remarks on the overwhelming need for women as nurses, teachers, and private tutors: “Die deutsche Frauenauswanderung nach Afrika,” Mitteilungen des Frauenbundes der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft 6 (10 June 1931), 72. Copy in Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Nachlaß 37 Hintrager. RKA 1197, 30 Hintrager 10 July 1926 to the foreign ministry Division for Colonial Affairs, Berlin. The Reichsmark replaced the mark as the national German currency in 1924 (through 1948). Men’s subsidies from Eberhardt, Zwischen, 144–45; and RKA 1197–98 detail the respective amounts the league spent for women up to 1931: 1926: 20,000 reichsmarks; 1927: 60,000; 1928: 45,000; 1929: promised 65,000 (reduced to 10,000 in austerity cuts); 1930: 8,000; 1931 25,000. (The total is 168,000 marks.) Schilling, “Deutsche Frauen,” 74, notes the Weimar age limit of 36 as evidence of the program’s pronatalist intent. Eberhardt, Zwischen, 146, on the bankruptcies; Sandler, “Colonial Education,” 185, 192. The directors claimed this figure in 1944. Knapp, RKA 1197, 117 and 1198, 82 and 259. First quote, 117, second, 82. Schumacher, RKA 1197, quote on 268, and RKA 1198, 235 and 265. Quote from RKA 1197, 32, Brückner, foreign ministry, to ministry of finance Ministerialrat Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, 30 Aug. 1926. Hintrager, “Zur Rassenfrage,” 19, remarked, “The handling of this ‘woman question’—as the file was labeled—together with the secret codes lay in the hands of the most discreet officials.” See also Adolf Rüger, “The Colonial Aims of the Weimar Republic,” in Stoecker, German Imperialism in Africa, 314–19. RKA 1197, 317-21, Bericht von Frau Voigts, 17 Oct., 1929, quotation from Hintrager to foreign ministry 4 Apr. 1928, 86. Quote from Anlage RKA 1197, 50-50RS, Windhoek, 27 Jan. 1927. Author appears to be Voigts. The archival records on the program end in 1931. For example, RKA 1197, 94, 3 Nov. 1928 depicts the program’s cost overages for that year. Hans Grimm, Das Deutsche SüdwesterBuch, 2nd ed. (Munich: Albert Langen, 1937), 50–129, records her family’s history. Frida Voigts was born Frieda Koch, the daughter of a professor in Braunschweig and the niece of her husband Gustav Voigts’s former merchant employer. They married in 1902 while he was on a visit to Germany and soon returned to South West Africa. He was one of the founders of the South West African department store Wecke & Voigts, lived on Farm Voigtsland, and served as a reservist in the Herero War. Their family was in Germany when World War I broke out, and he served in the German army. The family returned to South West Africa in 1920, where Gustav died in 1934. The Frauenbund booklet, 25 Jahre Kolonial-Frauenarbeit (1932), 18–19, reports an additional twenty-five emigrants who were assisted through June 1932. See also RKA 6693, 258-30. The prewar Women’s League sponsored 561 women’s settlement in Africa, primarily employees of more than 2,200 women and children funded through the German Colonial Society by 1914. The numbers of sponsored women to South West Africa by year follow from Ausschuß des Frauenbundes der Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, 10 Jahre Frauenbund, 22–23, 1908: 57, 1909: 69, 1910: 75, 1911: 96, 1912: 107, 1913: 90, 1914: 67. Wildenthal, German Women, 191.

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47. Silvester, “Beasts, Boundaries and Buildings,” 104 on labor shortages in farms and rural areas; Wallace, “A Person Is Never Angry,” 83 on officials’ efforts to bar African women from urban areas. 48. RKA 1197, 312, quote from Hintrager, who attributes this point to Voigts in his report to the Colonial Division, 8 Jan. 1930. 49. RKA 1198, 192-93, Hintrager, 28 Sept. 1931. Overview for the final available report on the sponsored women. Reports in 1929, 1930, and 1931: 1197, 115-303; RKA 1198, 8-163; and 1931 report, 211-372. 50. Data in O’Donnell, “The Colonial Woman-Question,” 103-4. Overview and report on the sponsored women and RKA 1197, 308, Hintrager, 8 Nov. 1929. 51. Hintrager, “Die deutsche Frauenauswanderung nach Afrika” remarks on the cultural roles for sponsored women; see occupational information in Table A.7, appendix. 52. RKA 1197, 320-21, quoted from Bericht von Frau Voigts. 53. Her phrasing was, “Macht einen recht [burschikosen] Eindruck.” Else Thomas, originally as a household assistant (Stütze) to Wilhelmstal, RKA 1197, 285. RKA 1198, 151 and 295. She married a farm overseer. Despite the implications which her boyishness and independence might suggest, I found no evidence of her or other German settler women in lesbian relationships. 54. Statistics from Bericht von Frau Voigts, “318 and quote from 319. 55. Wildenthal, German Women, 178. 56. Broadsheet on the program, RKA 1197, 101, figures from the Women’s League annual report, Jahresbericht des Frauenbundes der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft (1929-30): 6–7; the league‘s annual organizational overview, Koloniale Frauenarbeit (1930): 18–19 describes declining many applications based on such personal inquiries. 57. Quote from Hintrager, Berlin to the Colonial division, 2 June 1930, RKA 1198, 6. An example of the following expurgated negative remarks about the emigrant Behren sisters: “Irma is said to be cheeky,” and “Charlotte is supposedly incited by her sister,” were replaced with “Both are excellent girls.” RKA 1198, 17. 58. Definition from Bergmann, Discreet Indiscretions, 49. 59. Superficial examination of the experiences of several of the East African emigrants also point to the lively trade in gossip there. East African immigrant Else Wulff “complained somewhat strongly about the gossip mongering and intolerance of Germans for each other,” and shipmates deliberately frightened Maria Seeling into believing that her assigned future employers were white slavers. Report on Seeling appears in RKA 1197, 271; and Wulff, RKA 1198, 287. 60. For example, RKA 1198, 60 and 339 describe one adventuress who quit her job and formed rapid attachments to various men, including married ones, soliciting expensive gifts from them before returning to Germany. 61. RKA 1197, 273 and 1198, 271. 62. Quote from RKA 1197, 318 from Bericht von Frau Voigts. 63. Report on Käthe B. in RKA 1197, 298, and 1198, 262; quote, 262. Quote regarding Suzanne v.d.O. in RKA 1197, 297. 64. Quote from Protokoll: Ausschuß-Sitzung des Frauenbundes der DKG, am 5. Februar 1929, RKA 1197, 109. 65. Such as Rohrbeck, RKA 1197, 252-53 and 1198, 119; and Winter, RKA 1197, 298, and 1198, 262. 66. RKA, 1198, 40 and 349. 67. RKA, 1198, 92. 68. RKA, 1198, 312. 69. Some who joined the league included Kalff, RKA 1197, 188 and RKA 1198, 273; Pahlke, RKA 1197, 239 and RKA 1198, 209; Quack, RKA 1198, 114 and 320; and Sternagel, RKA 1198, 145 and 313.

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70. Rendsburg students Irmgard Dreckmann, Blondine Forster, and Elfriede Knapp all had especially close relations with their employers and their families. In 1928 twenty-three-year-old Elfriede Knapp was placed as a Stütze: “She is one of the first students of the Rendsburg Colonial Women’s School and founded the good reputation that the school enjoys there,’ RKA 1197, 197; and she maintained “superficial cohesion with the Rendsburg students,” RKA 1198, 82. Rendsburg students also visited each other and corresponded, and seem to have kept in closer touch with the Women’s League in South West Africa and Germany. The Berlin office sent at least one former student a special Christmas package, RKA 1198, 16, and 334. 71. Quote is regarding governess, Karla Bortfeld, who emigrated in 1931, RKA 1198, 403. Among others who faced health and acclimation issues, Albertine Adams, emigrated in 1927, and was unhappy in various positions first in Otjiwarongo and then after moving to Johannesburg, South Africa. She finally sought to return to Germany, “since she does not fit in Africa,” (RKA 1197, 115). RKA 1198, 211 reported she had applied for a position as teacher at the Rendsburg school, but noted the league intended to disabuse the director about her. Others reportedly unsuited to South West Africa were: Danneker, RKA 1198, 245, and Dobermont, RKA 1197, 145. 72. First quote regarding Menge from RKA 1197, 221; second from 1198, 96. First quote regarding Morgenstern from RKA 1197, 228, and second, RKA 1198, 215. Immigrant bride Käthe Dannecker, too, was “very disappointed with the Germans in Africa.” (Quote about Dannecker from RKA 1198, 245). However, immigrant “daughter of the house” (Haustochter) Maria Mohr was “very happy with her stay in Africa,” and became “a good farm wife,” (First quote regarding Mohr, from RKA 1197, 227 and second from RKA, 1198, 235). 73. Grossmann. Reforming Sex, 2–15 on the new woman, which documents the greater sexual freedom for women in the postwar era, including access to sex education, birth control, and abortion. Michelle Mouton, From Nurturing the Nation to Purifying the Volk: Weimar and Nazi Family Policy, 1918–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 36–38, notes single, and more independent, postwar German women’s continued desire to marry.

  CHAPTER 9

German Women and the Nazi Colonial Movement

In the late 1920s many Germans in South West Africa regarded the rising NSDAP as just another extremist Weimar nationalist party. A number of existing German nationalist and imperialist organizations on the right already had demanded the return of South West Africa and other former colonies to Germany and opposed the South African drive to annex South West Africa. South West African Germans already worked collectively within the local ethnic organization, the Deutsche Bund für Südwest Afrika (German Association for South West Africa, or German Association) to maintain the Germanness of the territory. The German Association was the most influential German group in South West Africa. Founded in 1924 to promote German settlement and other interests in the mandate, it served as the German settlers’ chief political and cultural organization. The German Association had long demanded parity for German as an official language in the schools and administration with English and Afrikaans, successfully unifying ethnic Germans in the former colony.1 But by the late 1920s German settlers in South West Africa faced two looming economic crises that threatened their tenure as farmers, mine workers, and small businesspeople: the Great Depression (1933–39) and a long series of droughts, but especially 1929 to 1934. As this chapter details, the twin economic catastrophes discredited the mandate system in the eyes of Germans who believed the South Africans in charge would never give them a fair deal. Their resentments seemingly led many South West African Germans to favor Hitler’s radicalism, particularly his promised restoration of the German colonies. By 1933 Nazism had become a visible presence in South West Africa, and the head of the Women’s League in South West Africa, Frida Voigts, was one of the party’s most prominent supporters in the mandate. She described her reasons for joining:

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I am convinced that in a while [in South West Africa] we will all belong to the [Nazi] Party, because that is today’s Germany, to which we must all hold fast if we don’t want to be integrated into the Union [of South Africa] someday, which would be tantamount to suicide. The party is not . . . any one personality . . . rather it is Germany, in which order and cleanliness once again reign—though not always flawlessly. But the great movement is underway and all of us want to participate in it with our best effort and take part in its construction. . . . Frau von Boemcken wrote to me in her view: Take the movement within yourself! I therefore became a party member, which I as an old lady by all sympathy could have avoided easily, and you would not believe what I have endured for it already. Many times, people have treated me like a leper.2 Here, Voigts’s commentary reflects both her self-interest as a South West African German as well as her ideological sympathies for the party. The head of the league, Agnes von Boemcken, helped persuade her of the need for close party ties within the colonial women’s movement. Voigts makes clear as well that her support for the Nazis created problems for her and her fellow travelers. Historians do not necessarily agree that the rise of Nazism signaled increased racism in South West Africa, since white racial segregation and purity had been guiding principles among the colonizers in the region for decades. In fact, South Africa witnessed the formation of rural Afrikaner proto-fascist organizations in the 1930s modeled on the Nazi stormtroopers (Sturmabteilung); many called themselves “grey shirts” among other colors of uniforms. Like the Nazis, these Afrikaner gangs violently embraced anti-Semitism. In addition, the global economic crisis that had hit the region especially hard seems to have exacerbated white communities’ anxieties over the status of poor whites and about racial mixing. Residents from the three major white ethnic groups (Germans, British South Africans, and Afrikaners) also typically shared broad racial views of white superiority that justified their social and economic dominance and political supremacy over indigenous Africans. However, the South West African mandate’s political party system under South African control fractured along ethnic lines as the Nazi movement grew.3 Existing histories of the era largely overlook the role of German women like Frida Voigts in promoting Nazi politics in South West Africa, since she operated behind the scenes. Political power rested in the South West African Legislative Assembly—all-white male representatives chosen by all-white male voters. Even then, legislators merely served as advisors to the administrator appointed by the prime minister of South Africa. Still, German women played important roles in local communities, doled out charity, and helped shape and popularize the Nazi movement through social ties to Germany and to organizations with strong ties to Nazis, including the Women’s League that ran youth scouting movements, lending libraries, schools, and other key sites of infiltration. The league sponsored the

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settlement of Nazi women in South West Africa and also sent schoolchildren to Nazi Germany for education or medical care. In many ways, the Nazi era marks a culmination of a long history of social divisiveness in South West Africa in which the Germany community governed itself through gossip, character assassination, and rumormongering, as previous chapters have detailed. The 1923 memorandum known as the London Agreement had introduced mass naturalization of German residents in South West Africa as citizens of South Africa. Naturalization was a precondition for voting in mandate elections, and Germany offered dual citizenship, but a minority of Germans still opted out of the automatic naturalization process rather than dilute their civic ties to Germany. German women technically could vote in German elections, but not in South West African elections, until women’s suffrage in 1939. Until early 1932 a majority of German-speaking voters in South West Africa gravitated toward the majority Afrikaners to forge a compromise multi-ethnic party, the Verenigde Nasionale Suidwes Party. Even in the legislative assembly elections of April 1932, Germans and Afrikaners pitted their common interests against the British-dominated Union Party, whose name refers to its promotion of South African annexation of the territory.

Figure 9.1. “Pfadfinder der ‘Heiss-Flagge,’ Nationale Feier–Windhuk/S.W.A.” (“Pathfinders ‘Raise Flag’ — National Festival Windhoek, [South West Africa].”) German Scouts hoist the Nazi flag at a German festival in Windhoek. Photo: Nora von Steinmeister, Women’s League, c. 1933. https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/kolonialesbildarchiv/content/ titleinfo/11487084 Courtesy of the Colonial Picture Archive, Goethe University Frankfurt/ Main Library: urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-679736.

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Among the Verenigde Nasionale Suidwes Party’s concessions to German voters was support for parity of German language use as a third official language in South West Africa. However, the rapid rise of the Nazi Party in legislative races Germany by mid-1932 raised South West African Germans’ expectations that Hitler soon would become chancellor. Many South West African Germans convinced themselves that he would negotiate or coerce the restoration of the former German colonies, and this false hope encouraged the reigning leaders among the mandate’s ethnic Germans to greater political intransigence and unwillingness to cooperate with either Afrikaner or British South African parties.4 An overseas branch of the NSDAP organized in South West Africa by 1929, but only began to make headway in the summer of 1932, as the party’s legislative successes grew and immigrant party members from Germany proselytized in scattered communities in South West Africa. The sympathetic Lüderitzbucht Newspaper was among the first to report on a public Nazi speech and Hitler Youth rally in July 1932 in the town of Tsumeb, estimating the cheering crowd at 150 persons and claiming the event won over many new members to the party. (Records indicate that twenty-three of the district’s twenty-six Nazi members in October of 1933 had joined in 1932.) The mandate’s English language newspaper, the Windhoek Advertiser, first reported organized Nazi involvement in local politics that September, citing rumors of party members’ collective decision to support the liberal newspaper publisher German John Meinert in the mayoral election in Windhoek rather than risk the election of his rival, Sam Cohen, a Jewish businessman from South Africa.5 Several excellent histories record the Nazi Party’s rise in South West Africa following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor of Germany in January 1933, and depict the intense jockeying for power between various Nazi factions and leaders in the mandate. A parallel struggle emerged between competing Nazis in the metropole from rival camps over control of the German colonial movement including the German Foreign Office, the Foreign Organization of the Nazi Party (AuslandsOrganisation), the foreign ministry, and the Reich Colonial League (Reichs Kolonial-Bund). The league’s head was charismatic colonial war veteran Ritter von Epp, who from 1934 onward also headed the newly formed Nazi Colonial-Political Office (Kolonial-Politisches Amt). The struggle among factions in Germany sometimes played out in South West Africa. For much of the 1930s the leaders of the German Association for South West Africa stood outside the Nazi Party, notably Albert Voigts, who was the brother-in-law of Frida Voigts. He and other established German political leaders wrestled to retain their authority in the face of the growing Nazi influence in the former colony.6 The Nazi movement in South West Africa in 1933 was small but strident. Researchers establish several key findings: First, that only about 1,125 (11 percent) of Germans in South West Africa applied for membership in the NSDAP by 1934. Second, that economically distressed Germans were most likely to join: cattle farmers were especially drawn to Nazism, and the party was strongest among the

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German residents in the central, cattle-producing regions. Unemployed mine workers from the mandate’s shuttered copper and diamond mines were a less numerous but economically desperate contingent, explaining why the copper mining town of Tsumeb became an early hotbed of Nazism. Third, generational differences skewed party membership toward younger Germans. Youths who had belonged to branches of German Pfadfinder (scouting) organizations in the territory almost unanimously remained in their troops after they were coordinated by the Nazi Party, and many also later traveled Germany on educational and cultural exchanges.7 The league served as a key mediator for these exchanges and so played a pivotal role in cementing South West African Germans’ ties with Nazi Germany. Still, because German women were disenfranchised in South West Africa, it is understandable that there is no thorough history of German women’s role in the Nazi movement in the mandate. This chapter exposes some of the backstory: the chair of the Women’s League in South West Africa (Gauleiterin) Frida Voigts joined the NSDAP and successfully parlayed her influence toward making her organization the central Nazi women’s organization of South West Africa. Archival records reveal that Voigts conspired with the chair of the Women’s League in Germany, Agnes von Boemcken, a Nazi who also joined the party after Hitler’s seizure of power, to make the league the overseas counterpart to the Nationalsozialistische Frauenschaft, (National-Socialist Womanhood) the women’s wing of the NSDAP, which was the largest German women’s organization under Hitler.8 Just as in Germany where the National Socialist Party imposed strict limits on women’s activism and ideological autonomy, South West African Nazi leaders were also exclusively men who exacted Voigts’s obedience to party teachings as well as her public silence, forcing her to steer through a morass of party politics, personalities, and rivalries. Voigts successfully drew on her intimate knowledge of local German personal networks in the territory to navigate this volatile political landscape. The following narrative centers around Voigts to demonstrate how existing diasporic ties to Germany in South West Africa quickly assumed a Nazi tenor after 1933, in part because Nazi funding served as a lifeline for destitute South West African Germans. Although the South West African Nazi movement was highly secretive, South Africans eventually investigated Voigts as a prominent leader and a suspected Nazi. In 1934 and again in 1939 police seized her correspondence; many of these captured archival documents reflect how Voigt’s leadership positioned the Women’s League as a player in Nazi politics in South West Africa between 1933 and the official banning of the Nazi Party in October 1934 in the mandate. (After this date, political analysis between her and correspondents in Germany becomes less candid.) Easily dismissed as a mere women’s benevolent society, as developed below, under Voigts’s aegis, the league in South West Africa continued operating as a key intermediary of Nazi influence, propaganda, and largesse through 1939, and even after.

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Furthermore, these records reveal how Voigts kept the South West African branch of the Women’s League of the German Colonial Society alive even after all its chapters in Germany dissolved, alongside all of the other existing colonial organizations in Germany in 1936, when Hitler ordered them absorbed into the Reich Colonial League. Under orders of the regime, Germany’s popular colonial societies dissolved under Nazi control (Gleichschaltung or coordination) and their former members collectively joined the massive and opaque Reich Colonial League in 1936. Even after the mandatory Gleichschaltung, the former chair of the Women’s League, Boemcken, also remained in service to the Reich Colonial League’s Division IV—Cultural Affairs, which mobilized the former members of all the Women’s League chapters in Germany to carry on their former chapters’ areas of activism. The Gleichschaltung not only ended the league but also ended the existence of a separate women’s colonial movement in Germany by placing it under men’s authority. However, Boemcken’s unit remained active in mobilizing German women’s colonial activism, supporting the Rendsburg Colonial Women’s School, and promoting German educational institutions in the former colonies, as well as publishing a colonial women’s magazine through much of World War II. This chapter evaluates the persistence of German women’s colonial activism from Nazi seizure of power through World War II.

The Women’s League in Nazi Germany As chair of the Women’s League and wife of a prominent colonial veteran and public figure with Nazi ties, Julius von Boemcken, Agnes von Boemcken joined the NSDAP in May 1933 and welcomed Hitler’s dictatorship enthusiastically on the pages of her organization’s magazine, Die Frau und die Kolonien (The Woman and the Colonies). In her official correspondence with Voigts, the district chair of the Women’s League in South West Africa, Boemcken expressed her joy when Voigts also joined the Nazi Party and raptured that, “Every word from Hitler now has greater meaning, since everyone now around the world knows how unanimously we all stand behind him.” She also elaborated on her unquestioning support for the league’s coordination into the party, but showed understanding of the difficulties Voigts would face in enforcing membership in the Nazi Party within the South West African chapters, which might cause the mandate administration to intervene: “It is therefore not necessary that all of the chapter heads in [South West Africa] are exclusively members of the NSDAP. . . . Still, it is natural that chapter heads and other members of the advisory board join the party, so that one can feel even more connected with them and to be absolutely certain that they are working in unison with us.”9 Here, Boemcken revealed her own eager acceptance of the first Nazi coordination of the league, despite the required purging of non-Aryans, including Jewish Germans, leftists, and other scapegoats from public life after 31 March 1933.

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Thereafter, members of the league and all other private organizations in Germany were subordinate to the Nazi Party, restricted membership to those of Aryan descent, and could refuse new members and eject existing ones without showing cause. Historical analysis reveals that Boemcken voiced little regret for the many longtime members compelled or choosing to withdraw from the Women’s League in the course of the Gleichschaltung. Of the forty-two chapter heads with the longest tenure, at least eighteen stepped down from their positions between 1933 and June 1934. In 1935—when new measures restricted chapter leadership in Germany to women who were members in both the Nazi Party and its women’ wing, National-Socialist Womanhood—another striking number of further retirements ensued.10 The national offices of the Women’s League also turned over. At the meeting of the league’s general committee (Ausschuß) on 23 May 1933, Boemcken called for members to coordinate with the Nazi regime voluntarily, disingenuously suggesting the process was optional, although after 31 March private organizations either enacted coordination or faced dissolution. The meeting resulted in the collective resignation of the board and the announcement of a new protectoress for the society (the duchess of Saxony-Coburg and Gotha) and the admission of two new members, Frau von Papen and Frau von Neurath, wives of the German vice chancellor and the foreign minister, respectively. Boemcken repeatedly tried but failed to attract one of the wives of men within Hitler’s inner circle to the league’s board. Meeting minutes celebrate the recent “most fabulous achievements [fabelhaftesten Erfolge]” in the expansion of the organization and an upsurge in colonial enthusiasm in the wake of Hitler’s rise to power, with ten new chapters founded and a rise in memberships of several thousand, so that the organization approached a new height of nearly twenty-five thousand in total.11 Five senior leaders of the Women’s League joined the Nazi Party in 1933, and the board added four longtime female Nazis. Similar to other German women’s organizations, the league experienced an uptick in membership and activism as its leaders readily capitulated to Nazi demands, although it was a more minor boost than other, more prominent women’s associations. As a flood of female opportunists and true-believers alike joined nationalist organizations and the party, the league became yet another conservative women’s society coordinated within the overarching umbrella association for all German women’s organizations, the Deutsches Frauenwerk (German Women’s Bureau), maneuvering to gain influence in the new regime and retain its former autonomy, though they ultimately gained little concrete power to show for these efforts.12

Nazi Political Activism in South West Africa While Boemcken and other officials in the national leadership of the league displayed staunch loyalty to Nazism, local struggles for leadership of the NSDAP in

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South West Africa created confusion and dissension over whose authority they should follow. Both Boemcken and the league’s longtime business director Nora von Steinmeister, the granddaughter of chair Hedwig von Bredow, corresponded profusely with Frida Voigts, urging her to support the local Nazi leadership and offering insights into the complexities of the political shifts in Germany. Their effusive correspondence demonstrates that these three were avid converts to Nazism, eager to see Hitler make good on his promises to restore the former German colonies.13 Nazis had no legal avenue to enforce coordination in overseas organizations. Still, a number of German South West African societies voluntarily adopted the trappings of the Nazi Party at their events, singing the Nazi anthem or HorstWessel song, displaying swastika flags, donning party insignia and emblems, and exchanging the Hitler-greeting in piecemeal fashion. Rival factions of German Nazis, including several with backing from Germany, aspired to coordinate the major German institutions in South West Africa through fiat. They targeted key institutions for takeover, most prominently the German Association, the German school boards, and youth scouting organizations. Frida Voigts obeyed the directives of the Nazi Party head in Windhoek, but some individual members and even whole chapters of the league did not, as developed below. Voigts’s correspondence offers useful commentary on the personalities and activities of local Nazis. The first major Nazi Party representative arriving with instructions from Germany was a former German Association chair, Dr. Fritz Brenner, now a newly minted party member affiliated with the NSDAP Foreign Political Office in Hans Rosenberg’s directorship. In early June 1933 Brenner traveled to South West Africa with access to 150,000 marks from the German government for relief for German farmers. As one of the leading teachers in Windhoek, he quickly sought to impose dictatorial control over the main academic high school for German students in the mandate, the German Windhoek Oberrealschule (high school). He addressed the school board, demanding its dissolution and acknowledgement of his personal control over its reconstitution at its meeting in 22 July 1933, only to face his retaliatory expulsion from the board by his liberal opponent, newspaper publisher John Meinert, and other board members at the following meeting on 9 August. Historians have concluded that the ensuing, perpetually unresolved, chain of lawsuits and public fracas over Nazi coordination of the school board poisoned the atmosphere between Germans in the mandate. Reports in the local newspaper soon charged that vandals broke Meinert’s printing shop window and telephoned threats against him due to his opposition to Brenner. These and other complaints of vigilantism alarmed South West African authorities. Majority members of the South West African Assembly had cast doubt on the loyalty of Germans in the territory and threatened to suspend the London Agreement guaranteeing Germans equal political footing with the British and Afrikaners. They next began entertaining a bill to criminalize political interference in the mandate from foreign organi-

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zations, causing German members of the South West African Assembly to resign en masse in protest on 16 August 1933. Voigts lamented that Brenner had made enemies with “two-thirds of the German population, at least the cultured ones,” and expressed her fellow Nazis’ concern that Brenner’s actions were splintering the German population. As one of the region’s cultivated elites, Voigt’s qualified support for Brenner confirms the notion that Germans who joined or opposed the Nazis did not divide neatly along lines of class, occupation, or longevity in the region, but Voigt’s case suggests gender divisions were unclear as well. Local squabbles and personal differences among South West African Germans played a huge role in deciding exactly who joined which political factions. Rivalries within the party sometimes also played out within the sphere of local politics.14 For example, Oberstleutnant and SS Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel and SS Senior Assault Unit Leader) Hans Bauszus arrived in September 1933 following the Windhoek school board debacle, representing the head of the German Colonial League Ritter von Epp’s interests in resolving the controversies stemming from Brenner’s attempted coup. Bauszus ordered Brenner to cease all further political activity. Next, Brenner’s rival, NSDAP Landeshauptmann (administrative leader for the country) in the mandate, Ernst Wandke, successfully exploited Brenner’s misstep to assume control over the contested Nazi war chest to aid German farmers. These were funds that Frida Voigts claimed she badly needed to shore up the position of the league in the territory, which would allow the organization to assist more local women and children. Wandke controlled Nazi Party funds, forcing Voigts to cultivate his approval, although she privately disapproved of him as well.15 The rise of the Nazis in Germany had brought forth desperate demands for assistance from needy South West African Germans, most voicing resentment that their fellow Germans in the mandate had failed to alleviate their sufferings. A sample letter from a Nazi Party member and colonial war veteran to the head of the German Colonial League, Ritter von Epp, described his work as a German emergency relief worker in a road crew of twenty-eight unemployed men. He complained that the local Afrikaner women’s benevolent society had distributed clothing among the Afrikaners in the unit, while none of the German colonial organizations had given his fellow German members anything.16 Newspaper accounts suggest private assistance to needy whites was localized; some places organized fundraising and giving along ethnic lines, while others combined their efforts. Clubwomen led most of these philanthropic initiatives, including German ones. In Windhoek Frida Voigts’s letters reveal she jockeyed fiercely for 10,000 marks from the Nazi war chest against Suzanne Grau, head of the Windhoek home for the aged, which was housing a coterie of homeless and destitute German settlers.17 A smattering of letters to Nazi authorities that were forwarded to Voigts reveal the utter economic desperation of some German farmers in the mandate, filled

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with seething rage and resentments against those in charge. One sample appeal letter vehemently scapegoats the South Africans as Jews, and the author self-identifies as a Hitlerite, although critical of the Nazi Party: “All our appeals to the Foreign Office, Welfare Office and my brother for money to send my wife on an urgently needed recuperation in Germany have been unsuccessful. . . . [W]e have become completely, really utterly without hope. Now a Union supporter has brought a ban on the Nazi movement to the Assembly. The Nazis—I resigned because they were perpetrating too many idiocies for me, but I am self-evidently an enthusiastic Hitler supporter—have done nothing here against anyone, they are very quiet and peaceful. But the Jewland of the Union that so loves to hate Germans must have an outlet.” Another missive complained bitterly that South African charities were circulating Freemason novels as Christmas presents to his children.18 In selfinterested representations such as these, it is difficult to ascertain their authors’ sincerity. Nonetheless, the derogatory language of these appeals suggests how effectively Nazi propaganda in South West Africa exploited Germans’ economic distress, directed locals’ existing hostility toward South Africa, and laced it with rabid anti-Semitic and Freemasonry paranoia. Such missives are indicative of Nazi ideology’s spread in South West Africa, even though the actual numbers of Germans joining the Nazi Party remained in the minority. Just as destitute South West African Germans couched their appeals in Nazi slogans, by joining the party herself Voigts won access to key funding to distribute to those the Nazis deemed worthy. Other chapter leaders of the Women’s League in South West Africa took more courageous stands in rejecting the Nazis, without regard to the party’s large coffers. The chapter head in Omaruru, Frau F. von Katzler, whose own family farm Ondongandje faced economic ruin, still vocally objected to growing Nazi influence. She led a faction of local clubwomen in exodus from the league, rather than participate in the organization’s coordination. When Boemcken wrote from Germany in detail about Katzler and the Omaruru situation to Voigts, she cast them as obstructionists and herself as righteous: “Particularly here, it is more important than ever ‘to do right by all mankind’; I truly hope that Frau von Katzler will reflect quietly and unhurriedly on the matter, rather than launch any more great protests.”19 Boemcken maneuvered so the Women’s Association of the Red Cross for Overseas Germans also would not endorse the breakaway chapter in Omaruru, though this did not prevent von Katzler’s faction of local women from establishing a new, unaffiliated, apolitical, and multi-ethnic Frauengruppe (Women’s Group) for Omaruru in late 1933, rather than willingly coordinate. A much-reduced league chapter survived in the town under Nazi women’s leadership; their program for Mother’s Day 1935 included a reading of a poem by Hitler about motherhood, and the collective singing of rousing patriotic songs including the Horst Wessel song.20 The renegade league chapter in Omaruru was hardly the only one posing problems for Voigts and Boemcken. The league in South West Africa faced a host of difficulties during the Gleichschaltung, which necessitated a new constitution. In

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addition, the mandate’s Nazi Party head, Wandke, was supposed to vet all new chapter heads. Boemcken encouraged new chapters to form in South West Africa because she desperately hoped to avoid other major German women’s organizations such as the German Women’s Bureau or the National-Socialist Womanhood from spreading in the former colony (rumored to be afoot in Keetmanshoop and Lüderitzbucht). Boemcken feared these Nazi women’s groups might replace the league as the main Nazi women’s organization in South West Africa. Voigts complained to Boemcken that she did not have sufficient authority as district chair to resolve the many ticklish issues confronting her in the coordination, seemingly referring to the conflicts within local chapters between Nazis and their opponents.21 To further complicate coordination, Voigts and Boemcken agreed that in some towns the clubwomen most closely affiliated with Nazis were not suited to become local chapter heads, while in other towns local members objected that their current leaders were not sufficiently enthusiastic Nazis. By late 1935 the unaffiliated Omaruru Women’s Group celebrated its two-year anniversary as a purely philanthropic club, welcoming all ethnicities without respect to politics. In the previous year, the organization reported it had successfully sponsored five children in the local school and dormitory and other worthy causes, demonstrating that care of the local settler community could succeed without recourse to Nazi funds.22 Their effort to support German children attending the local schools rather than sending them to boarding schools where Nazi teachings were prevalent offers a further signal that opposing the Nazis was possible in South West Africa, as long as whites overcame their ethnic differences.

Voigts’s Approach in Key Political Conflicts The South West African branch of the Nazi Party took over key German institutions in the mandate, particularly the German Association and scouting organizations, despite Brenner’s failed seizure of the Windhoek school board. As Voigts recorded in her letters, Nazi infiltrations provoked a series of heated conflicts within the Windhoek German community. The more the Nazis tried to assert control, the greater the controversy, and so the greater the danger that mandate authorities would intervene to outlaw the party. In the battle over Brenner’s attempted takeover of the Windhoek schoolboard, Voigts wisely had sought to remain on the sidelines, although Voigts feared his victory “would lead to all sorts of upheaval.” Voigts reported more happily to Boemcken when, in November 1933, Nazi elements assumed control of the German Association by staging a coup at the annual delegate elections in order to insert sympathetic elements into its leadership.23 However, she was embarrassed to discover the Windhoek chapter of the Women’s League openly opposed the Nazi infiltration of the German Association. She wrote apologetically to the local party office: “I regret that the chapter in Windhoek

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has taken a position in the matter of the D.B. [German Association]. I want you to know that this occurred without my knowledge, and I did not wish for the Women’s League to mix itself in politics.”24 Her remarks imply Voigts regarded her own involvement in the Nazis as apolitical. Within the Windhoek chapter of the league, those who distanced themselves from the party, or at least particular members, as morally suspect and uncouth were most outraged by Voigts’s defection in joining the party.25 In particular, the Windhoek chapter head Gertrud Wallberg, whose husband directed the Oberrealschule, and Frau O. Fricke, the wife of the German consul agent for South West Africa, Hans Fricke, not only declined to join the NSDAP, but also strongly objected when the Windhoek party leader’s wife, Ruth Wehber, sought to assert control over the local chapter of the league. Wallberg and her fellow Windhoek women also castigated Voigts for joining the party without notifying them in advance. Local Nazis attempted to discredit the Fricks and Wallbergs, alleging Edgar Wallberg’s ties to Freemasonry, decrying Fricke’s wife as being a Jew, and also disparaging Gertrud Wallberg’s character publicly. Still, Gertrud Wallberg fixedly remained at the helm of the Windhoek league chapter through February 1935. She not only opposed Brenner’s takeover of the Windhoek school board, but also further undermined the position of the league with the party by resisting its local youth chapters’ coordination into the Nazi youth organizations, the Bund deutscher Mädels (German Girl’s League) and Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth).26 In August 1933 Voigts herself had also expressed great concern about the Nazi Party’s planned coordination of the German youth organizations in South West Africa, which included the league’s own scouting troops. Voigts feared the Nazis would not select local youth leaders who set a high moral tone for young women or teach them strong national identification as part of their core values: “The [youth organizations] should raise these girls so that they would for all time never be capable of flirting with an Afrikaner boy.” She further noted that, as a party member, she had to keep silent, but acknowledged confidentially that the local chapter of the scouts had refused to accept Wandke as their head because in the evenings he openly consorted with “black wenches [schwarzen Weibern],” and she hoped for his rapid replacement. In February 1934 Boemcken quietly rejoiced at Wandke’s recent departure and begged Voigts to quash the damaging rumors that Wandke had been seen socializing in public with a pupil from the league’s Bredow school dormitory for girls. So, the two women privately skewered their opponents’ characters, but remained loyal Nazis even when their own moral principles and the welfare of their charges were at stake.27 In public, Voigts put a positive face on the compulsory coordination of the league’s scouting groups into the Hitler Youth and League of German Girls, embarrassed that the Windhoek chapter was the only one resisting: “This is the only youth group that refuses to join the League of German Girls—it should not be, since the youths should stand united in our land.” In Voigts’s opinion, as she ex-

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plained, the benefits of South West African German children connecting at an early age with the Nazi movement outweighed all other considerations, presumably including the local party head’s perceived immorality.28 However, Gertrud Wallberg remained adamant that placing German children in the hands of the Nazis was morally indefensible. When she could no longer resist direct orders, she obeyed reluctantly. In an urgent telegram to the foreign minister in February 1934, she proclaimed her objections: “I have initiated the transfer of our youth group into the League of German Girls. I consider this moment to be unimaginably inauspicious for their complete amalgamation, however, since the Anti-Nazi Law and the murders in the local Party headquarters are exciting the political situation here, and the youth group’s integration into the party would then make it vulnerable to the intervention threatened by the local government.”29 As Wallberg noted, South West African newspapers reported that the government of the Union of South Africa finally had recommended the administrator of South West Africa enact the criminal law amendment barring foreign political interference, the so-called Anti-Nazi Law, in January 1934. The murders she mentions are undoubtedly lurid newspaper accounts from 24 February of an intra-party squabble as Heinrich Weigel deposed Wandke’s faction to become the new party leader. The conflict escalated, causing an expelled party member to commit a double murder–suicide in the Hansa Hotel in Windhoek. The killings further discredited the standing of local Nazis, as Wallberg alleged.30 As a result of the Wallbergs’ defiance, the South West African Nazi Party head Heinrich Weigel and his underlings denounced them as anti-Nazi reactionaries to German authorities. In May the Wallbergs traveled to Germany to defend themselves against these charges. Under pressure and a sudden supposed illness, Edgar Wallberg reversed his former opposition and declared his personal loyalty to the Nazi Party, thereby securing the backing of the foreign ministry. When a new Territorial Youth Leader arrived in South West Africa to take over local chapters of the Hitler Youth and League of German Girls, he also joined the party’s denunciation of the Wallbergs. In response, Voigts, von Boemcken, and others in the league felt forced to defend Gertrud Wallberg, despite their own long history of personality clashes with her. Behind the scenes, they resumed pressuring her to step down as chair of the Windhoek chapter of the Women’s League soon after her return from Germany.31 As their correspondence makes clear, Voigts and Boemcken stood united in their support of the Nazis in South West Africa even when they had to sell out former allies and friends.

Securing the Women’s League in South West Africa The unquestioning support for Nazism within the leadership of the Women’s League was especially sinister because the group masqueraded as an apolitical,

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charitable organization. They channeled Weimar and later Nazi state support to German schools and dormitories in South West Africa (as well as in Lupembe and Oldeani, in the British mandate for East Africa, contemporary Tanzania) where the funds helped promote Nazism among their young charges. These German colonial schools in Africa, with their associated Hitler Youth and League of German Girls chapters, served as outposts in spreading Nazi ideology to the young. The league and the Nazi-controlled German Association in South West Africa also strategically began mobilizing existing regional reading circles and small lending libraries to spread Nazi propaganda. League business director Nora von Steinmeister envisioned creating reading circles in colonial outposts and providing “the best books to recommend or send, for example about racial science [Rassenkunde], heredity lessons, et cetera,”32 with the purpose of spreading Nazi views on racism and eugenics. In late 1933 the league sought to expose even more German children to Nazicontrolled schools. Voigts began to circulate questionnaires to identify German children in smaller towns with poor whites like Keetmanshoop and Gobabis where some parents could not afford to enroll their children in private German schools or to pay their boarding fees to regional German schools. Voigts complained that

Figure 9.2. “Deutsche Kolonial–Zeitung, Deutscher Kolonialdienst, Geo, Deutsche Presse, Kolonie und Heimat.” Nazi magazine propaganda distribution for Germans in Africa: https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/kolonialesbildarchiv/content/titleinfo/11415241 Courtesy of the Colonial Picture Archive, Goethe University Frankfurt/Main Library: urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-705841.

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these children “grew up among the Boer children” rather than identifying as Germans. Although the Women’s League had lost its youth groups to coordination in the Hitler Youth and League of German Girls, Voigts remained committed to promoting German children’s welfare in the mandate. She collected and forwarded the names of German children from families she identified as particularly needy to the league headquarters in Berlin as well as to the local school administration, the South West African Nazi Party, and the German Association.33 Archival documents reveal Voigts’s efforts promoted segregation of poor whites along racial lines through assisting South West Africa’s German schoolchildren to attend German boarding schools. Moneyed German families in Keetmanshoop and Gobabis and other southern towns already sent their children to the private German boarding school in Lüderitzbucht. The remaining fifty-four children in Keetmanshoop were crowded into two local classrooms with two German instructors for all levels of instruction. The local chair informed Voigts, “Many parents take exception to the fact that a whole group of the children are not pureblooded.” She provided a roll of local schoolchildren marking about a dozen as biracial children and two as Jewish children. Voigts also hoped to renovate and reopen the league’s former Homeland House maids’ hostel as a dormitory to house the German Keetmanshoop schoolchildren, in order to remove them from the Afrikanerrun local pension. Voigts and Boemcken likely intended to deploy Nazi funding to impose greater ethnic and racial segregation among German children in the district and expose them to Nazified curricula, but placed a benign face on the project by casting the project as aid to needy children.34 Boemcken scrambled among her contacts in Germany seeking funding to assist the children’s education with little initial success. If no funds were forthcoming, she projected that the organization might be able to conduct its own street collections in Germany in the coming summer, provided the Nazi authorities permitted their resumption. By contrast, a private company’s donation in Windhoek resulted in the purchase of property on which to expand the league’s Bredow House dormitory for girls. However, Voigts ascertained by August 1934 that the problem had been exaggerated out of proportion: “The alarming news that 300 to 400 German children were unable to attend a proper school through lack of means was a false one, and a more exact investigation revealed that only 41 children were impacted.”35 Still, she urged the league to make these children a priority. Voigt directed this aid for needy children to push them out of their racially mixed community schools in order to attend segregated German boarding schools with active Nazi propaganda and youth organizations. Then, in a meeting in 1934, the German Foreign Ministry conferred on the league the primary responsibility for the welfare of German children in South West Africa. The public posture of the Women’s League as a charitable rather than a political organization, combined with its reliably Nazi leadership, may have played into the decision. At a meeting of German colonial organizations at the foreign

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ministry, officials met Boemcken as well as representatives of the Colonial Society, Red Cross for Germans Overseas, and the Colonial Veterans’ League. Ministry officials conferred on the league direct state funding to aid German school children’s education in South West Africa, to maintain school dormitories in the former German African territories, as well as to promote girls’ and women’s emigration to the former colonies in Africa. As a result of this reorganization, the other colonial societies now had comparatively reduced spheres of activism for youths in the former colonies: the Women’s Association of the Red Cross for Germans Overseas was assigned midwifery, for example. The Colonial Society assumed responsibility for securing instructional materials for German schools in Africa, but the league also took over some of this work by November 1934, which involved funneling Nazi educational propaganda into German classrooms in South West Africa and the British mandate of East Africa. In general, Boemcken further urged Voigts to ensure the league deployed these new funds to look after the truly needy German families first, as well as to give them priority in distributing aid such as Christmas packages and reading material from Germany. Boemcken even urged inviting German settler families that could not afford the dues to the league’s lectures and other chapter events. In this manner, she hoped the league could further spread Nazi ideology among poor whites throughout the mandate. Boemcken also may have been reacting to the allegation that the league favored ladies and children of the so-called better classes in disbursing its resources, rather than the “simpler strata of the Volk.”36 Boemcken, clearly fearing such criticisms might undermine her political position, urgently advised Voigts to work closely with the party leadership in South West Africa and to cooperate with the party’s goals fully, in order to “secure the undisturbed continuation of the league’s work, about which there seems to misunderstandings in many places.”37 Boemcken regarded these so-called misunderstandings by the party as dangerous, because she fretted over rumored attempts to found external National-Socialist Womanhood cells in Keetmanshoop and Lüderitzbucht, which she claimed would compete with the league. She advised Voigts to convince the local party head to recognize the continued need for their organization over these rivals: “Our work belongs to us and shall not be taken over by the National-Socialist Womanhood.”38 Boemcken feared that disputes over coordination with the party in local chapters might jeopardize the league’s continued autonomy, especially if various highly placed South West African Nazis complained about deviations from party line in their local chapters. Voigts wrote pessimistically in private, doubting whether the league could successfully comply with party coordination in order to forestall the formation of National-Socialist Womanhood chapters in South West Africa, particularly given the shortage of Nazi women in some districts and the impulse to found branches of the National-Socialist Womanhood in heavily Nazi districts rather than wait for the party head to approve party members as replacement chapter heads in the league:

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“Herr Weigel wants to one day found National-Socialist Womanhood [in South West Africa], which I—according to the wishes of Frau v. B am trying to avoid, and which Bauszus also does not want yet. But who else cares much about it?”39 Voigts expected that, in time, the Nazis would win over most South West African Germans, but the process strained existing social networks among Germans, not to mention their ties to other white ethnicities. In Lüderitzbucht, the wife of the local party head Grete Lehner took social offense at the chapter head, Baroness Henny Kraus, an Austrian, and threatened to start a local National-Socialist Womanhood chapter unless a new election replaced her. As a noble, Kraus was the most prominent member of the local chapter, but was not eligible to continue, since she did not hold German citizenship. Lehner’s deposition of Kraus resulted the rapid turnover of several new chapter heads in the district over the next few years. Similarly, in Okahandja party member Frida Sigwart complained that her fellow league members opposed her candidacy to become chapter head: “I am completely convinced that that my membership in the NSDAP very much detracted against me in the election.” The group of women who objected to Sigwart had ties to an older radical nationalist paramilitary group, the Stahlhelm (Steel Helmets) and its female auxiliary. Sigwart still won confirmation from the local Nazis, despite losing handily seven to sixteen votes. Her opponent complained at the imposed outcome, “We are not fighting against the Führer-principle, just this Führerin.”40 Voigts’s efforts to appease the party clearly set some league chapters at odds. The most controversial case arose in the league chapter in the ethnically divided working-class railroad town of Usakos, where the local gymnastic master and district (Kreisführer) Nazi Party head was the mechanic Fritz Johann Schenk. Schenk was married to a so-called respectable, biracial Baster woman from the Dickson family (thus she was not ethnically German), although their children were enrolled in the German schools. Normally, the wife of the local party representative would have led the local league chapter. Instead, three members of the local league chapter threatened to resign if the chapter even retained Schenk’s wife as a member. After hearing these complaints, Boemcken wrote to Voigts confidentially, seeking background on the case. “Of course, we must intervene immediately since it is the last thing that we can and may do, to tolerate Mischlings in our Women’s League. It is truly outrageous. But I know how often things are talked about and distorted, so that I must not enter into the matter before I have your own judgement.”41 Boemcken placed confidence in Voigts’s social nous to determine whether Frau Schenk should remain in the league. The question of Frau Schenk’s eligibility tested the racial norms of the former German colony against obedience to Nazi racial dictates. Boemcken expressed sympathy for Frau Schenk, but also determination to exclude all biracial women from the league. Nevertheless, Boemcken advised Voigts to defer to the South West African Nazi Party head, Weigel, expecting him to order Frau Schenck’s re-

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moval. Instead, Weigel mollified his fellow party member, approving Frau Schenk’s continued membership. The three women who had denounced Schenk’s wife faced permanent expulsion from the league, instead. Voigts explained in principle that Frau Schenk was from the critical generation, before strict racial lines had been enforced in South West Africa. She ruled that the three women who caused such social turmoil needed to learn more respect for the Nazi reordering of the old settler social hierarchy.42 Many historians have noted that colonial racism and Nazi racism were not fully overlapping ideologies, and both Nazi racial views as well as colonial racism were often contradictory and inconsistent.43 The mandate Nazi Party leadership seemed to be most inclusive by seeking the largest number of potential party members, despite the long tradition of white social exclusion of biracial families from the German settler community. Voigts seemingly sought a balance between respecting each chapter’s autonomy and requiring their necessary obedience to the local Nazi Party head in making racial determinations: “In various chapters the new position of Germany toward racial questions has raised difficulties. . . . It is recommended to chapters, however, that whether absolutely none or not small objections against those previously included are raised, that the matter be handled gently, and to continue to lead the members in silence, until the Central Office or other responsible parties change the regulations.”44 In principle, Voigts stated that she favored retaining old members wherever possible, noting that neither the principles of German citizenship nor Nazi ideologies of ethnic and racial comradeship [Volksgenossenschaft] offered clear guidelines favoring biracial members’ expulsion: “Future generations excluded through small-mindedness now will be lost to us Germans forever.”45 Voigts thus quieted the Usakos situation, but ensured that she would face similar cases in the future. Within the historical context of South West African society, Voigts acknowledged the long tradition in the region of deferring to local sensibilities in drawing racial boundaries, but she was also aware that South African authorities now were cracking down on the Nazi Party in the mandate, and might move harshly against her organization if it began bullying racial outsiders.

Banning of the Nazi Party In early July 1934 the Windhoek Hitler Youth group organized a Day of German Youth, and invited white children throughout southern Africa to participate. The local Hitler Youth leader, Erich von Loßnitzer, conducted the ceremonies in full uniform with swastika armbands. He arranged for the hoisting of the Hitler Youth flag at the event, despite the passage of a mandate law banning foreign political symbols. On 11 July the mandate administration responded by outlawing the Hitler Youth. Police searched the headquarters of the organization as well as Nazi Party offices throughout the mandate. The South African Advisory Council, which was

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empowered to investigate the political situation, studied the seized files and cited the display of the swastika at a scout jamboree as the forbidden use of a foreign political symbol, then deported Loßnitzer.46 On 3 September 1934 the mandate administration published a lengthy report of the council’s findings concerning the activities of the Hitler Youth and the Nazi Party, publicizing the seized documents to demonstrate that the party had tried to take control of the German Association and to influence German voters as well as over the territory’s German youth organizations, while stirring up hatred against Jews and Freemasons. On 29 October the administration expelled party leader Heinrich Weigel and banned the Nazi Party in the mandate. In the wake of these investigations, the government also fired several teachers from the Swakopmund school who had Nazi ties, with little other cause. Police next searched prominent Nazi Party members’ houses and seized their files. Voigts was apparently among them, resulting in the holdings of many of her papers in the Namibian archives dated through October 1934. Following Loßnitzer’s deportation, Frida Voigts assumed a position as head of the League of German Girls in South West Africa. Correspondence between the leadership in Germany with Voigts became much less effusive after Boemcken began fearing mandate political surveillance, limiting analysis of their relationship after this date. (Her final letter in archival holdings arrived through personal connections in an effort to evade postal censors, including five copies of a speech that she asked Voigts to circulate by hand to sympathetic eyes only.)47 In her remarks to Voigts, Boemcken began by putting a positive spin on the fact that in the future the league in South West Africa would now fall directly under the supervisory authority of National-Socialist Womanhood and its head, Gertrud Scholz-Klink: “If things continue to go as well as we think and hope, Frau Scholtz-Klink will already be aware of the difficulties that must be considered [in South West Africa] and will do everything to forge unity within the women’s movement there.”48 Historians argue that the organizational rivalry drove the NationalSocialist Womanhood’s efforts to subsume the league from the very beginning. Boemcken informed Voigts that, due to Scholz-Klink’s preeminence, she must preapprove publication of a propaganda article by colonial writer Sophie von Uhde about the league in South West Africa. In a further concession to party obedience, Boemcken bowed to the unfortunate fact that the party once again did not permit the usual street-corner collections for Colonial Week, forcing the league to seek other funding sources. As several histories of the Nazi women’s movement note, the league faced other difficulties under the new regime, such as when Nazi officials revoked their permits for public addresses and withdrew the organization’s right to exchange foreign currency. Boemcken also struggled and failed to win an exemption for a mandatory portion of her organization’s collections (up to 40 percent) dedicated to the National-Sozialist Volkswohlfahrt (National Socialist Welfare) charitable coffers. While the Nazi regime’s byzantine rules propelled many

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conservative clubwomen in Germany back into private life, Boemcken remained in place despite these setbacks, apparently with undimmed loyalty to the Nazis.49 The league’s individual chapters in Germany still continued to support their special causes overseas. However, after 1934 the primary efforts of the league increasingly were national rather than local. The national league widely distributed Nazi propaganda overseas, earmarked for circulating libraries, schools, and dormitories in Africa; organized educational exchanges of South West African children to Germany; and sponsored settlement for German women in overseas German communities. However, in May 1936 the Nazi regime ordered all German colonialist organizations to disband so that a reconstituted Reich Colonial League under Ritter von Epp’s leadership could absorb their former members directly. This shakeup allowed unmediated ties between the Nazi Party’s colonial apparatus and the masses of German colonialist followers. The current president of the German Colonial Society, Heinrich Schnee, resisted its dissolution, but Boemcken followed orders. Unfortunately, because bombing in World War II destroyed the Reich Colonial League’s organizational records, piecing together how the league chapters in Germany experienced its dissolution is an exercise in frustration.50

The Women’s League Faces Dissolution The end of the Women’s League of the German Colonial Society took place with little public fanfare on 5 June 1936, as an announcement of its disbandment appeared in its journal German Women and the Colonies in August. Following the liquidation and reformation of the new Reich Colonial League, it stood ready to induct the league’s thirty thousand former members directly. The rank-and-file women colonialists were to continue their former efforts on behalf of the German communities remaining in Germany’s former colonies of South West and East Africa as part of its Division IV, Cultural Affairs (Abteilung IV, Kulturelle Aufgaben). A final annual report on the former accomplishments of the league and the future of the newly reconstituted Reich Colonial League dated October 1936 justified the reorganization by noting the league’s limited capacities and recognizing a need to draw on the resources of a larger, more unified common colonial movement— which the Reich Colonial League supposedly represented. Established histories mark this moment as the decline in Nazi ambitions in Africa, as Ribbentrop’s foreign ministry successfully circumscribed the Reich Colonial League’s influence, perhaps also signaling Hitler’s own shift in territorial ambitions toward annexing Eastern European lands.51 Chair Agnes von Boemcken’s final circular to all Women’s League administrators, members of the board, and the district and chapter leaders in late May 1936 outlined in more detail the restructuring plans. Her overview details a future without a separate German women’s colonial movement, which was placed under male

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leadership and Nazi Party control: “Men and women will work together in good comradeship on behalf of the great colonial effort; the [male] district heads of the Reich Colonial League will appoint those [women] who have until now served as [league] district and chapter leaders as Referentinnen [female advisors] . . . .” As she explained, the men in the chapter leadership would be answerable for the completion of women’s assignments, but the scheme did seem to promise at least a continuation of women’s former work for Germans living in the former African colonies.52 As Boemcken’s overview reveals, the reorganization not only suppressed German women’s independent roles within the colonialist movement, but also all public debate over imperialism in Nazi Germany. In addition, the bureaucratic reshuffling erased the visibility of individual women’s efforts for colonial causes, although the Reich Colonial League and the Nazi state now occasionally assumed credit. Since the German Foreign Office had channeled funding secretly to colonial welfare causes through the league since at least 1926, the new order may reflect the tacit acknowledgement of a long-standing reality in which the German colonial women funneled state moneys to politically sensitive causes overseas. Now, however, the Nazi state dictated the direction and recipients of their largesse, which they focused on German youths in the former colonies in Africa.53 The final annual report of the Women’s League of the German Colonial Society highlights the expanded focus on drawing overseas German youth to Nazism, which ongoing Nazi efforts to spread propaganda in colonial German schools had already demonstrated. Their foremost new priority was encouraging German language instruction in the former colonies of South West Africa and East Africa in 1935, attributed to the generous financial underwriting from the German Foreign Ministry and the foreign organization of the NSDAP. The 1935 colonial school budget for the South West African territory alone totaled 69,000 reichmarks (or about $3 million today). The report claimed only twenty-six ethnic German schoolchildren in the mandate of South West Africa were not enrolled in the Nazifunded public or private German classrooms and dormitories. Additionally, the organization subsidized tuition and/or boarding fees for about seventy-five children to attend government-run German schools. The report also detailed full or partial support for seven additional German schools (some under construction) in the former German East African territory at a further cost of 44,000 reichsmarks.54 These expenditures do not include additional subsidized emigration grants for fifteen female tutors and governesses for private German households in South West Africa between 1935 and 1936. Further grants and tuition stipends to youths from both the former East African and South West African territories funded study abroad in Germany to pursue higher education for forty-one students in 1936 alone. Some of these exchange students attended university, while some of the young women attended the Colonial Women’s School in Rendsburg. A newly established dormitory in Germany for up to sixteen German high school students

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from the British Mandate of East Africa, which had no German high schools, opened in Bad Harzburg in April 1936. As discussed below, Germans from the former colonies also won stipends to Nazi political leadership institutes. Lesser but still important propaganda efforts directed at winning youths and their families in Africa included massive book and periodical shipments—1,800 magazine issues a month to German reading circles, libraries, and even isolated private German settler homes in Africa. In addition, the propaganda budget enabled the shipment of fourteen high-powered battery radio receivers to German schools and other institutions in former East and South West Africa to ensure colonial Germans would gather to hear the führer’s speeches.55 The Nazi movement’s symbolic care for German children and their mothers already was a hallmark of party propaganda, which encouraged women to dedicate themselves to reproduction as part of their service to the Reich and its robust population growth.56 The Nazi pronatalist policies dovetailed neatly with the longstanding charitable efforts of the league to provide German women’s maternity care in Africa. The league could afford to endow only a single charity bed in the obstetrical ward in the South West African town of Gobabis, in the early 1920s. After 1935 Nazi funding allowed the league to dedicate a further 11,000 reichsmarks for colonial German settler women’s subsidized travel, rest, and medical care in Germany. Finally, the organization now boasted a nursing home under construction in the town of Buea, the first major project in the former colony of Cameroon, for local German mothers suffering from the debilitating effects of its tropical climate.57 All of these efforts seem calculated to increase German births and encourage overseas German youth to support the Nazi cause in Germany.

Marginalization of German Women’s Colonialism The Reich Colonial League continued to publish the Women’s League’s former official magazine The Woman and the Colonies through 1943, but its format gradually dwindled in size and frequency. Though the magazine continued to publish articles after the coordination of the Women’s League, it distributed mainly generic colonial propaganda. Reports on its back pages that had detailed the many league chapter activities in Germany became much sparser, and primarily chapters outside Germany continued to publicize their highlights. In the pages of the January 1937 issue, for example, a surviving league chapter in Lauban (Polish Silesia) featured descriptions of a public colonial hour for members and friends. Their program offered a photographic slideshow from Africa with commentary by a former colonist in Africa Frau Bormann of Langenöls (Olesno, Poland), accompanied by a poem, dancing, and a book exhibition. The surprising depiction of the Polish-Silesian frontier as the seat of German colonial enthusiasm corresponds to current research suggesting that Nazi Germans—including many within the colonial movement—

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viewed the African and Eastern European frontiers in a similar light, as ripe for German colonialization. Historians continue to dispute the reasons for and the implications of this Nazi demarcation of the East as a colonial zone. Was it a purely symbolic effort to redirect the existing colonial movement toward Hitler’s growing ambitions to absorb German populations in neighboring areas such as Sudetenland and Austria? Was it intended to maintain the relevance, resources, and political sway of the Reich Colonial League and Nazi Colonial Political Office as Hitler’s interest shifted from regaining the lost German colonies? Or, did it hint at Nazi war plans by recategorizing Central and Eastern European territories as open to German colonization, to justify the conquest and later annihilation of their peoples by likening them to uncolonized regions and populations in Africa?58 Within the history of the German women’s colonial movement, I argue that Hitler’s escalating territorial ambitions toward the east and away from Africa chiefly marks their growing political irrelevance. A detailed report in The Woman and the Colonies from a former league chapter head in Aachen in March 1937 depicts their views of their coordination in the Reich Colonial League Division IV-Cultural Affairs, where they served as female advisors to the city’s all-male Reich Colonial League board. The board oversaw nine smaller local district groups, which each also had one senior former Women’s League member as a representative of Division IV. The text depicts how the male leaders offered no assistance in women’s efforts for collecting reading materials and shipping them to colonial Germans, although the defunct league chapter had relinquished 90 percent of its former hard-earned treasury to the Reich Colonial League, and was forced to contribute to broader fund-raising rather than drum up funding for their own project: “It is now necessary for us not to lose heart, to patiently clear up misunderstandings, and to build a real communal membership with the fixed belief that in due time our shared goal of the peaceful restoration of our former German colonies will be achieved.”59 Between the lines reveals the loss of these women’s former autonomy. Their remarks also hint at their friction with the Reich Colonial League’s more socially diverse and younger membership. In any case, her words make clear that the stated goal of full cooperation between men and women in the Nazi colonial movement was as yet unrealized. A second press release from a chapter in Dortmund in December 1938 depicts an afternoon lecture fundraiser, featuring local colonialist clubwomen’s display of handmade Christmas gifts for German children in the former colonies. Women clearly played the main part in this event, but attendees and participants included the leadership of the local National-Socialist Womanhood chapters and other area women’s organizations. Their description reveals that, in some cities and towns, the old women’s colonial movement remained strong and was still staging gatherings, while working closely with the main Nazi women’s groups, to gather presents to demonstrate to the “Germans overseas, that they will not be forgotten by us.”60 These descriptions suggest that former league members still felt personal connec-

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tions that kept them committed to the continued Christmas gifts and other support to their adopted chapters in Africa. The Division IV annual report for 1937 mentions fifty crates of gifts dispersed to German children in settlements throughout Africa, but in November of 1938 a portion of the Reich Colonial League gifts instead went to needy German children in the recently annexed Czech Sudetenland. The Nazi welfare authorities who reported on the reallocation suggested that their Winter Help collections actually had purchased manufactured gifts to distribute instead of the traditional hand-crafted children’s toys that chapters in Germany had formerly cooperated to make and distribute.61 The diverted aid indicates the Nazi state bureaucracy’s efforts had begun to shift public attention and resources away from colonial Germans in Africa with an eye to support for Germans settled in the Eastern European borderlands. German women did continue to organize colonialist-directed social and cultural events. For example, the Dortmund Division IV women’s advisor, Frau Friedel Meininghaus, hosted and invited the entire chapter membership of the Dortmund Reich Colonial League to a Colonial Hour, advancing colonialist ideas and headlined by public speaker and author Gertrud Busch of Dresden, who lamented the bitter loss of the German colonies but offered highly inaccurate depictions of Africa. The event offers insights into the shallow uniformity of mass Nazi colonial propaganda based on repackaged Wilhelmine and Weimar remembrances, while audiences of millions of Germans consumed these uncomplicated but also unrealistic colonialist messages through films, exhibitions, and other events. The members of Dortmund Division IV also contributed a display of Colonial Wares, including tropical and exotic foods, raw materials, and wild animal skins from the former German overseas colonies to a Christmas Fair fundraiser for the Dortmund National-Socialist Womanhood and the German Woman’s Bureau, to benefit their local Nazi Mother’s School. These schools were designed to instruct German women Nazi teachings on proper Aryan motherhood, child care, and racial hygiene. The colonial clubwomen hung signs urging the visiting public “Not to Forget the German Colonies” as they served pastries and East African coffee to raise money for the cause of training German women to be reliable Aryan mothers. Whether Nazi members of the Reich Colonial League (which allegedly reached a million members) constituted an active mass movement rather than just an audience for the Reich Colonial League’s propaganda machine is a further question that remains open to historical debate.62 The ties between the German Women’s Bureau and Division IV of the Reich Colonial League further strengthened after 1938 when the bureau’s representative for Borderlands and Overseas Germans announced her organization’s establishment of a new advisory board for ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) in Eastern Europe and in the former colonies, pledging the entire German Woman’s Bureau membership of 12 million women in support for Division IV’s book collections and other aid to German settler women in the former colonies. A Division IV’s

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spokesperson, Eva MacLean, published an article in The Woman and the Colonies in January 1939 that suggested Division IV was making strides in spreading colonial ideas to German women around the globe and drawing in masses of new supporters. She noted that formerly, colonial work had been the special area of a few interest groups, but now she asserted that colonialism was a mass movement that attracted German women’s growing participation: “Here, in the homeland, our colonial works in the past year have won wider ground, and the Reich Colonial League has increased its female membership enormously.”63 Despite her brave words, Division IV’s closer ties to mass Nazi women’s organizations were far more likely to weaken German women’s connections to colonialism, and MacLean fails to report membership figures or other concrete evidence to substantiate her assertions of growth, remarking, “It is not the purpose of this message to provide a statistical overview of the work that women do for our colonies, only an impression of how mighty and diverse are our women’s efforts to participate in colonial activism.”64 In reality, it is likely that the formerly separate German women’s colonial movement continued to dissolve as their projects increasingly came under overlapping Nazi state bureaucracies that assumed responsibility for their completion. As the German women’s colonial movement submerged within the mass Nazi women’s organizations, the Reich Colonial League was symbolically extending its aid programs for colonial Germans to assist ethnic German settlers in the Eastern Europe borderlands, further diluting the distinctness of German colonialism in Africa from historic ethnic German settlements in the East. Historians have noted that the pages of The Woman and the Colonies reflected the increasing shallowness of organized German women’s colonialism as World War II approached.65 After 1937 the magazine often repackaged remembrances from former German women settlers and colonialists over current ones, signaling the movement’s shift toward encouraging Germans to embrace colonial enthusiasm without emigrating to Africa. By 1939 the magazine rarely reported on local or organizational activities either inside or outside Germany, while articles about the former colonies became more descriptive than political, and original content dwindled. The June 1939 annual report of Division IV at the annual Reich Colonial League Meeting, delivered in the newly annexed Austrian territory’s capital Vienna, erroneously declared and later corrected that the German Women’s Bureau had absorbed Division IV fully.66 The error was the most obvious indication yet of the redirection of German women in Division IV to cooperate in the work of the mass Nazi women’s groups. Signals also pointed to a sharp decline in Nazi support for women’s settlement in the former German colonies after 1936. Historians of the Reich Colonial League conclude that, although some German colonialists refuted that German settlement in the East was a true form of colonialism, the organization successfully shifted its members toward activism for colonialist biopolitics on the European frontier. The Colonial Women’s School revised its curriculum to enlist in German women for Nazi biopolitics in the lands of Eastern

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Europe, where some of its graduates witnessed and colluded in the Holocaust. The maintenance of diasporic ties between Germany and Germans in Africa declined, however. Instead, Nazis encouraged overseas Germans, including former colonists to return to the homeland, in preparation for war. Eventually, the Reich Colonial League deployed many colonial returnees to promote German settlement in the borderlands, although they appear to be mainly wartime expellees of the British mandate authorities controlling the former colony of East Africa.67

Nazi Efforts for German Women’s Settlement in Africa Before being dissolved in 1936, the Women’s League had offered annual public reports regarding its sponsorship of women and children as settlers to the former German colonies. However, the records from the early 1930s indicate the program was struggling. Although by mid-1932 the league’s sponsorship had assisted 371 German women overseas through loans, their numbers had begun to dwindle. In the first months of 1931, there were no new employment opportunities in Africa. The Great Depression severely suppressed German women’s overseas employment and also constricted German state funding for the league’s settlement efforts. The first annual report after the Nazi takeover from 1933–34 is suspect. It mentions only a round figure of forty women and girls who emigrated to Africa that year and states that a few were teachers. The annual accounts from the remainder of the Nazi era are inexact, too, as explored below.68 In late Weimar the league shone the best possible light on their efforts, claiming a high satisfaction among participants the program and ongoing contact with their sponsored women in Africa, in particular the largest group, in South West Africa: “The majority of these emigrants sent good news to the Women’s League from Africa. . . . Only a few have returned to Germany.”69 As the 1932 overview makes clear, the organization earmarked its travel subsidies for women who could not afford passages themselves even though sponsored migrants who went into teaching or became ladies’ helpers overwhelmingly came from genteel backgrounds. In South West Africa Frida Voigts remained the individual responsible for remaining in contact with sponsored women, finding new positions for released or dissatisfied workers, housing the long-term unemployed, and even relocating them to other regions if they damaged their reputations among fellow South West African Germans. She published a warning in January 1934 to prospective migrants considering work in the Union of South Africa, perhaps in response to anti-Hitler reactions to sponsored women working there.70 After the Nazi takeover greater bureaucratic impediments in South West Africa compounded German women’s immigration and employment difficulties. In December 1933 Frida Voigts responded discouragingly about future prospects for German women’s employment in South West Africa. Voigts received a number of

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recommendation letters from women acquaintances in Germany seeking to assist genteel friends and family to find positions in Africa, but she discouraged candidates without means: “I am always in favor of capable German girls coming out, but now without a £40 deposit for her immigration, no one can journey here. To travel out, a capital outlay of £25 for the ocean passage and another £40 for the deposit [Bürgschaft] is required.”71 Voigts mentioned as well that, until recently, some contracted workers had skirted the deposit by pledging their word that they were employed, but now the full deposit was mandatory. The available salaries for genteel women would not offset the high initial costs. Other obstacles she mentioned included that mandate office workers typically had to command Afrikaans, English, and German languages.72 Despite these misgivings, Voigts continued to assist cultivated German women to find work as domestics in the households of her own friends and connections in South West Africa. She even had connections to women German settlers in other regions of Africa who could offer troubled recruits a fresh start. She appealed to a wide circle in South West Africa to win prospective immigrant women positions, despite the economic hindrances of the 1930s. Thanks to her efforts, a small trickle of new sponsored arrivals continued to travel from Germany through 1935, mainly without paid employment. One prospective employer complained that the program’s minimum contractual salary of £3 per month was excessive, since any number of “adventuresses” and readily employable graduates from the Women’s Colonial School in Rendsburg were available throughout South West Africa who were willing to work for only a pound or at most two a month.73 All evidence suggests that a handful of young German women applicants still had the independence, private means, and social networks to journey to German communities abroad, and even sometimes to multiple African territories, without much in the way of salary. The most prominent of these German women touring Africa in the 1930s was Sophie von Uhde, whose means as the daughter of painter Fritz von Uhde did not require her to take short-term employment. She published a wellknown travelogue of her experiences, Deutsche unterm Kreuz des Südens (1934).74 By 1936, however, the final annual report of the Women’s League indicates a suspicious and unexplained increase in the numbers for subsidized women’s emigration to South West Africa (from twenty-nine to seventy-five women). The figure is particularly surprising since Frida Voigts spent more than a year after her husband died, from July 1935 through November 1936, in Germany. She delegated oversight of the women’s employment program to her sister-in-law, Frau Dr. Emma (Emmi) Schmidt of Okahandja. The report from 1936 presents a comprehensive overview of the program to date, however, its data is in bar graph form without providing exact figures. The data are not only difficult to discern, they also fluctuate widely from year to year. The graph represents only South West Africa and East African settlements, leaving out a handful of female migrants to other destinations. The author of the report was the new official in charge of selecting prospective fe-

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male emigrants for employment, a representative of Division IV, Dr. Hanni Thom, who attributed the upswing in German women’s settlement from 1936 onward to the recovering economy in post-drought South West Africa.75 From 1937 on Division IV no longer offered annual statistical data for their women’s overseas settlement program, which suggests the numbers of sponsored German women traveling to Africa contracted sharply as Nazis began to look toward expansion eastward. The 1937 annual report for Division IV only highlighted data concerning its subsidized student exchanges for young ethnic German adults and schoolchildren from the former colonies to pursue work training and education in German institutions, including the Rendsburg Women’s Colonial School. Voigts’s correspondence strongly indicates that she did not regard most applicants for school exchanges from South West Africa for education in Germany as worthy, while fellow German settlers complained to her about the program because the growing number of young women and girls going to Germany would no longer be available to assist in local German households.76 A sample copy of the revised Division IV contract for sponsored settler women, dated December 1938, corroborates that its aim was spreading Nazi ideology to overseas German settler children. The overview of the program’s new provisions remarks that, in exchange for a financial outlay of one-third the fare, successful applicants would receive a subsidized loan for the remaining two-thirds (325 marks to South West Africa and 440 marks to East Africa). Contracted employees committed to remaining in their destination for at least two years. Prospective emigrants must provide a c.v., photo, references, and proof of Aryan heritage. Their c.v. should include mention of membership in any party organizations, as well as any courses and certificates completed. Applicants also must complete a year of political education. Both the (Frauenführung) Reich Women’s Leadership subsection for Colonial Work, and Division IV of the Reich Colonial League reviewed all applications. The contract packet and accompanying forms exceed fifteen pages in fine print, including an overview of dangers from exposure to tropical climates, which outlined nervous disorders, drug dependency, and sexual diseases, among key areas for doctors to screen applicants. The rigor of the review process and the complexity of the application are foreboding, suggesting that few participants could meet these criteria, and those who passed bureaucratic muster were likely to be loyal Nazis. The contract also acknowledged severe immigration barriers to South West Africa, such as the need to provide a surety deposit of one’s own or from an employer.77 The contract changes reflect the tightening immigration policies of the mandate. The Aliens Act of 1937 revealed the mandate administration’s growing consternation over the political direction of Nazi Germany, but also recognized the severely limited employment opportunities during the Depression. The act imposed new visa requirements and also restricted immigration to whites whose professions were most in demand. Mandate authorities also implemented an Immigrant Selection Board, which the German consulate claimed was biased against Germans and

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that denied most female applicants seeking work as servants to South West Africa or to the Union of South Africa. The German consul agent in Windhoek recommended that prospective South West African employers seeking visas for migrant workers provide testimonials for applicants confirming that suitable employees were not available locally, but denials continued because the review panel did not regard applicant female service workers as priority immigrants.78 Neither, seemingly, did Nazi propaganda. Division IV continued to assert that women workers from Germany were essential in overseas communities, yet in one of the final prewar issues of The Woman and the Colonies a newly arrived housewife’s helper offers an anodyne account of her experiences in South West Africa remarking at how civilized (i.e., Germanized) the farmer’s wife had already made her home, hinting that her own role was superfluous. The stated goal of German women’s subsidized travel to Africa now explicitly stood as eugenic support for German mothers in Africa, and this dictated the selection of “only those who have the necessary ideological, character, physical and professional qualifications to shape the healthy and good growth of our population in the colonies.” The program directed the employment of these “white helpers especially to child-rich but economically weak families.”79 The Reich Colonial League would deposit part their monthly’ salaries in German bank accounts as an added benefit to these families, furthering the symbolic value of Aryan motherhood in the former African colonies. The 1939 report only briefly mentioned the continued travel of settlers’ dependents to Africa, but a new type of German travel exchanges in Africa also emerged. These guests were colonial enthusiasts from Germany who paid stipends, through German bank accounts, to live for a few weeks or months with German hosts in the former colonies. The Reich Colonial League likely began to promote the exchange of these paid visitors from Germany because even licensed German teachers were no longer able to secure immigration permits to South West Africa.80

Assessing the Women’s League as a Channel of Nazi Influence The German women’s sponsored settlement program in South West Africa had existed since 1926 with German state support, but now faced insurmountable hurdles. However, in 1939 alone, more than a hundred youths from the former Germany colonies won subsidies to enter educational institutions in Germany, mere months before World War II began. (The Division IV stipends for students consisted of 60 percent grants and 40 percent loans.) Many German children from Africa with means also took part in these educational exchanges in Germany. Patriotism apparently motivated some of these youths, such as one young woman whose application came in response to Gertrud Scholtz-Klink’s call in the German Women’s Bureau journal in April 1939 for more student social workers to train for state service. At least one teenage boy from South West Africa, the son of a league

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member, won a place in the prestigious Nazi leadership training alongside other colonial youths at the Nazi National-Political Institute of Education (Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten) in Naumburg, Saxony. Thanks to the Nazification of German schools in Africa, most German children from the former colonies probably encountered Nazi ideology through propaganda and in boarding-school dormitories, curriculum, and youth programs. German girls even learned hereditary and racial science through afterschool programs in the recently dedicated Hedwig Heyl domestic science school in Windhoek, which conducted frequent staff exchanges with Germany to bring in politically reliable teachers.81 Despite these subsidized domestic science education classes for German girls in South West Africa, German housewives in South West Africa still deplored the weak housekeeping skills of the younger female generation. Many of these young women also displayed unwillingness to enter domestic service in favor of office employment and other professional opportunities. The head of the Bethanien chapter of the Women’s Colonial League lamented that many young German women in her district failed to learn from their mothers how to maintain their homes to proper German ideals of cleanliness, and she deplored the notion of allowing African servants to run a household to “African standards [using the racial slur Bambusen-Wirtschaft].”82 Her remarks made clear that, even after decades of sponsored German women’s settlement to South West Africa, and despite the best efforts of Nazi ideologues to inculcate high standards of German housekeeping and enforce Aryan racial principles, white settlers’ anxieties over white children’s exposure to disadvantageous intimacies with African servants remained. A few of the newly arrived migrants demonstrated Nazi ties and may have come to Africa from colonialist convictions. Frida Voigts specifically recruited a Nazileaning Rendsburg graduate for one fellow member, a Nazi Party member who went to Germany for the Olympics and the Nuremburg rally in 1936 and longed for a fresh, young Nazi girl’s company in her home. Voigts also sympathized with still another recent arrival because she was not able to socialize with any of her Nazi friends while residing on an isolated farm. The woman, a trained nursery-maid had completed in her Nazi Arbeitsdienst (year of service) in 1933 in a German settlement on the Czech border and later assisted in founding a Germanic enclave in East Prussia with fellow Nazi settlers. She then took work with the Nazi social welfare service near the border with Danzig. Her résumé stated she could drive an oxen team, as well as a ride a horse and a motorcycle. She claimed she had even built and flown her own glider-plane. Voigts tried and failed to placate her. Despite her political sympathies, she left her first employers with little advance notice because she missed social contact with other young Nazis.83 Another unruly immigrant domestic worker, this one seemingly from the working class, who arrived with a young son, also was too independent to fit in in the Lüderitzbucht school dormitory, perhaps because she was not a supporter of Na-

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zism. She found alternative employment with a Jewish resident of the city, to the local chair’s distaste, and rebuffed all efforts to recoup the loaned travel subsidy by threatening legal action. These cases underscore that some of the sponsored German women workers still disappointed their supporters. Some not only left their employers in the lurch, but they also complained about them to clubwomen in the local chapters, or in other ways disrupted the delicate social relations among Germans in local communities.84 On the eve of World War II social conflicts between German women in South West Africa remained all too apparent. Far from fostering unanimity behind the führer, the Nazi movement continued to spur disagreements. Voigts particularly lamented the over-dependence of her fellow German settlers on Nazi largesse, which was contracting in the mandate by the late 1930s. For example, Voigts imposed cuts to the program granting school tuition for the neediest children to attend German schools and pressed chapters to contribute more themselves for the exchanges, after a reduction in aid from Germany in 1937. Parents in Keetmanshoop now had difficulty paying for tuition in the more expensive German school in Lüderitzbucht. The local chair also denied a local applicant for study in Germany because her family had already received heavy loans from the Reich Colonial League, and she feared the parents would not be able to repay them. Perhaps surprisingly, some of the local chapter’s aid even went to assist the education of a few biracial children in the local German school with limited German language ability. Although Keetmanshoop chapter head, Margaret Wittemann, depicted a local biracial family in derogatory terms, she helped enroll their children in the local German school, the same school that Frau Voigts had worked to segregate in 1934. Wittemann remarked, “These people live as primitively as imaginable, and their children crawl about like shy little creatures; their mother is an African, who speaks not a word of German.”85 Her efforts to enroll them in the German school was due to their father’s Nazi ties, demonstrating once again that party loyalty took precedence over racial prejudices.86 In 1938 the Hochfeld chapter of the league immediately dropped one member after she publicly denounced Hitler. She was no longer welcome at local events and the chapter barred her family from all magazine and Christmas gift distributions. The chair also charged that the woman’s bad influence had altered her husband from a faultless German, while she had formed a friendship with an Afrikaner neighbor. The league’s ostracism represented a material loss to whole family, who also no longer received gifts and other resources from Germany. Germans in South West Africa seem to have taken regular aid from Germany for granted as part of their membership in the German community, as league donations had persisted for most of the past thirty years. Indeed, as the economic recovery slowly took hold among Germans in South West Africa, Voigts’s sister-in-law Emmi Schmidt remarked in her correspondence with Division IV in Germany that she and Frida

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Voigts were often angered by some South West African Germans with their “insolence [Unverfrorenheit]” in demanding assistance. Voigts also stated she particularly resented well-to-do Germans who exploited aid intended for less fortunate Germans.87 Still, Voigts also frowned on sending settler children on school exchanges to Germany if she believed they were poor representatives of the local German community, and she weighed a youth’s family life and their local reputation carefully when selecting prospective students for study abroad, warning one local league chapter head to discretion, “When you publicize something like this [the exchange stipends to Germany] then the people we don’t want will be coming to us with their applications—those who beg always and everywhere. Then it’s hard for us to turn these people away, if we don’t consider their children suitable to be sent over. . . . We only want to send the very best children there. What would we do if a girl applied who was not completely worthy?”88 Voigts pointed out that league chapters would have to support part of the stipends if poor children applied, and she hoped to reserve league funds for the most exemplary candidates. She clearly hoped to select German children for study in Germany who would impress their Nazi benefactors. Historians note that Voigts made exceptions to Nazi racial policies by retaining biracial and Jewish members in South West African chapters because this policy fostered unity within the league at the local level, but Voigts recoiled in 1938 when a chapter put forth a Baster girl for advanced education in Germany.89 In the end, Voigts understood that funding from the Nazis came at the cost of obedience to National Socialist principles. German settlers’ dependence on Nazi largesse and even neighborly solidarity with other Germans was tested after World War II broke out in September 1939. South African authorities soon interned nearly a hundred German men as suspected Nazis in a prisoner-of-war camp, Little Danzig, near Windhoek. More than 1,220 German men from South West Africa had been interned by September 1940, so many that the administration eventually moved them to a larger camp for Union of South Africa internees from Axis nations near Kimberly called Andalusia. Many of these men’s wives were forced to assume management of their farms and other business concerns. At first, they faced severe income losses.90 A number of households that could afford to hire help requested assistance locating German domestics willing to work for pocket money. Some German wives were forced to lay off their farm managers, and made do with only African workers. German settlers even had to recruit a new German teacher from Cape Town for a local school because travel from Germany had halted. The Otavi Mine in Tsumeb threatened to close, and local prices and currency valuations fluctuated dramatically. Germans, including needy pensioners, were unable to withdraw from their bank accounts in Germany. One local league chair described a local circular to identify potential families in desperate straits, and elicit offers to house home-

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less German families and individuals.91 Fortunately for them, the Union of South Africa began to provide stipends for all interned men’s families by March 1940, including those with biracial families. This assistance, unlike that of Voigts and her Women’s League, was provided without regard to a family’s race, reputation, or social standing.92 The German community survived the war, but paid a heavy price for its loyalty to Hitler. The mandate administration identified Frida Voigts among 197 German Nazis to be expelled for their political agitation, but eventually backed away from the order. Historical studies suggest that these ethnic Germans voters were necessary partners for the South African National Party to bolster apartheid politics, to suppress the rising politicization of Africans in communist and independence efforts. Among their first legislative moves in the 1940s were the 1949 Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act and the 1950 Population Registration Act, which divided the population into racial categories: Europeans, Africans, Coloureds, and Indians (Asians). These biopolitical policies continued to bolster the separatist ethnic and racial identities of Germans in South West Africa, and German women continued to work for the social reproduction of gender, class, and ethnic and racial boundaries between themselves and the African servants in their homes.93

Conclusion As this chapter has detailed, the leaders of the Women’s League willingly subordinated themselves and their organization to Nazi Party authority, though a number of members left the organization voluntarily or were forced out by the Nazi coordination. As chair of the league after 1932, Agnes von Boemcken not only joined the party but also encouraged Frida Voigts to join as well, though many of her fellow German settler women in South West Africa distanced themselves from the Nazi movement. The league mobilized through its existing diasporic ties to spread Nazi aid and propaganda to economically desperate Germans in South West Africa, to sponsor German women and children on exchanges between Germany and the mandate, and to encourage Nazi control of German settler organizations and educational facilities in South West Africa. Under Nazi influence, the league promoted the party’s eugenic and pronatalist principles in these communities. Sponsored German women’s settlement in South West Africa declined during the Great Depression, but even after 1936 the Nazis continued to recruit politically reliable German women for employment in South West Africa, especially to support ethnic German pronatalism as caregivers, nurses, and educators in the mandate. Archival documents confirm that Frida Voigts, as head of the Women’s League in the mandate, obeyed the party leadership in South West Africa, allowing the coordination of scouting troops into the Hitler Youth and League of German Girls.

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She adhered to contradictory Nazi racial dictates and political policies of various local party leaders, even when these created problems for her organization and its membership. As league head in Germany, Agnes von Boemcken hoped to maintain and expand the league as the main women’s organization within the German settler communities of Africa. However, once mandate authorities outlawed the Nazi Party in October 1934 the threat ended in the mandate. The league continued its work as a seemingly apolitical organization, in continuing to assist Nazi infiltration of the German settler community in South West Africa until June 1936. At that time, the Reich Colonial League disbanded all other German colonial organizations and absorbed their former members and projects. Because this study has focused on organized German colonial activism and biopolitics in cooperation with the German state, I interpret the dissolution of these historic colonialist organizations as a major watershed in this history. Nazi coordination ended the independent German women’s colonialist movement, but successfully redirected many of its members toward a new kind of colonialism, as Hitler planned aggressive expansion into Central and Eastern Europe. The Nazi absorption of the Women’s League brought its former members directly under male colonialists’ control, leaving no signs as to how its leadership regarded the new push for German biopolitics and settlement in Eastern Europe. After the 1936 reorganization, Boemcken and fellow German women colonialists were shunted to the Reich Colonial League Division IV, Cultural Affairs, where they sought to continue their former philanthropic aid to German settlers in Africa in the face of limited resources, growing bureaucratization, and increasing party indifference to Africa. Nazi aid to the local settler community also began to shift to Germans in the Sudetenland and other areas Hitler eyed for annexation. Germans faced new restrictions on entry visas to South West Africa, which also hindered sponsored German settlement in the mandate. The Nazi provocation of World War II, on 1 September 1939 ended such travel altogether. Voigts was targeted as one of the few active party members for her roles in the Women’s League and League of German Girls. German men in South West Africa faced internment and possible expulsion, and their families struggled to make ends meet without continued resources from Germany. The German settler community’s postwar future looked perilous, thanks to vocal minority support for the Nazis, which once had seemed a plausible pathway for the return of the former colonies. However, the National Party in South Africa relied on South West African Germans’ support for apartheid-era policies, which carried forward the long history of biopolitics in the territory. The apartheid era confirmed and gave new life to longstanding German ethnic, class, gender, and racial identities. German women in apartheid Namibia continued to play an important role in reproducing these social boundaries between themselves and the African population, especially among servants in their homes.

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Notes 1. Walther, Creating Germans Abroad, 158, details the origins of the German Association, which is sometimes depicted as a political party, but was also a lobbying, cultural, and philanthropic organization promoting German welfare that claimed to be above party interests. 2. National Archives of Namibia—NAN (Private Accessions A.221). The collection filing system lists box number, then cabinet/file number. Cabinet 90. Documents of the Frauenbund der Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, 1934–1939. The collection is unpaginated. Box 154 90/3, Voigts’s correspondence with Grootfontein. Quote from Voigts to Frau Julie Sievers, Grootfontein, 3 Apr. 1934. 3. Eberhardt, Zwischen, 85–90; Hayes et al., Namibia under South African Rule, esp. 34–39; John Higgenson, Collective Violence and the Agrarian Origins of South African Apartheid, 1900–1948 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015) details the rise of Afrikaner protofascist organizations during the crisis. 4. Eberhardt, Zwischen, 234–39, and 401 on women’s suffrage. 5. “Tsumeb,” LZ 178 (4 Aug. 1932); Eberhardt, Zwischen, 365 on Tsumeb’s Nazi Party membership; WAd 1325, 10 Sept. 1932. 6. Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich is the classic study; Walther, Creating Germans Abroad, 167–76. See also Willike Sandler, “‘Colonizers Are Born, Not Made’: Creating a Colonialist Identity in Nazi Germany, 1933–1945” (PhD diss. Duke University, 2012). 7. Albrecht Hagemann, Südafrika und das ‘Dritte Reich’–Rassenpolitische Affinität und machtpolitische Rivalität (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1989), 62; Eberhardt, Zwischen, 464–68. 8. National-Socialist Womanhood is a direct translation from German. In English, the organization is often translated as the “NS Women’s League,” but this nomenclature avoids confusion with the Women’s League of the Colonial Society. 9. Von Boemcken, “Zum Aufstieg,” FK (1 Apr. 1933): 37. Quotes from NAN, A221 160 90/32, Boemcken to Voigts, 27 Nov. 1933. Boemcken assumed the chair of the league after the death of Bredow in 1932; had long experience in colonial German East Africa and South West Africa (Wildenthal, German Women, 182–85). 10. Venghiattis, “Mobilizing,” 345–46. 11. Quote from NAN, A.221, 160, 90/32, Protokoll der Ausschußsitzung des Frauenbundes, 23 May 1933, which remarks on the patronesses, see also RKA 6695, 32, on Boemcken’s efforts to secure a more influential Nazi patroness through contacts with the foreign ministry. 12. At the pinnacle was an 800 percent increase in the National-Socialist Womanhood in 1933, Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland, 136, 143–44, 173–74; Venghiattis, “Mobilizing,” 336–41. 13. NAN, A.221, 160, 90/32, contains their exchanges. On Steinmeister’s life see Karl Wulff ’s edited volume of her letters, Briefen aus Afrika, 1932–1938 (Hamburg: Diplomica Verlag, 2013); and Venghiattis, “Mobilizing,” 336–41. 14. “The Criminal Law,” and “German Schools” WAd 1416, 26 July 1933; and “Legislative Assembly, Tuesday 25th July 1933,” WAd 1418, 2 Aug. 1933; transcripts depict Nazi agitation and threats, including in the German schools. NAN A.221 160.90/32, Voigts remarks to Boemcken on Brenner and school board, carbon copy date illegible. 15. Eberhardt, Zwischen, 224–25, 243 on Wandke and 246–47 on Brenner’s actions against the school board on its impact. Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich, 276, about Bauszus. 16. NAN A.221 160 90/32, Martin Beyerlin, Windhoek, 28 Oct. 1933, Abschrift. 17. “Deutscher Frauenbund in Windhuk,” KD Sept. 1921, 145; “90 Jahre Windhoeker Frauenverein,” Allgemeine Zeitung 1 Apr. 2011. NAN 160.90/32, Letters, Boemcken to Voigts, 30 Jan. and 9 Apr. 1934. 18. NAN A.221, 160 90/32. Quote from Abschrift, Curt Kleyenstüber, Windhoek, 20 Sept. 1933 to Ritter von Epp; a second letter from Martin Beyerlein, Windhoek, to Epp, 28 Oct. 1933 complaining that South African charities were circulating Freemason books to German children. Eberhardt, Zwischen, 205 on the relief.

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19. Quote from NAN A.221 160. 90/32 Boemcken to Voigts (i.A. Vollmar), 14 Nov. 1933. 20. WAd 1362, 18 Jan. 1933, contains a notice of the Katzers’ stock liquidation; “Omaruru,” WAd no. 1543, 15 Oct. 1933 announces the organization’s fundraising through organizing monthly card games. The Omaruru league chapter’s account of their Mother’s Day celebration appears in FK (1 Sept. 1935): 151–52. 21. NAN A.221 160 90/32, Boemcken to Voigts, 14 Jan., 29 Jan., 9 Apr. and 10 Apr. 1934. 22. LZ 23, no. 280 (6 Dec. 1935), “In-landsnachrichten. Omaruru”; NAN A.221 160 90/32, Boemcken to Voigts, 14 Jan., 29 Jan., 9 Apr. and 10 Apr. 1934. 23. Quote from NAN A.221 160 90/32, Voigts to Boemcken, Berlin, 30 Nov. 1933. 24. NAN A.221 160 90/32, Voigts to Oberstleunant [Bauszus], 24 Nov. 1933. 25. Quoted from NAN A.221 160 90/32, Voigts to Herrn Oberleutnant [Bauszus], 24 Nov. 1933; See also Boemcken to Voigts, 27 Nov. 1933 and Voigts to Boemcken, 30 Nov. 1933. 26. Venghiattis, “Mobilizing,” 340, and 399-402; Eberhardt, Zwischen, 248–50; Walther, Creating Germans Abroad, 167–72. I could not ascertain whether Frau O. Fricke was Jewish. 27. NAN A.221 160 90/32, Abschrift an Ruth Wehber, 14 Aug. 1933 from Wallberg, Fricke, et al. in the Windhoek chapter. Quotes from Voigts to Boemcken 30 Nov. 1933, in which she discussed youth organizations and remarked confidentially that the Hitler Youth refused to accept Wandke’s command because he consorted with African women. Boemcken to Voigts, 10 Feb. 1934 regarding the rumor of a girl from the dormitory with Wandke. 28. NAN A.221 154 90/3, Abteilung Grootfontein, Quote from Voigts to Chapter head Frau Julie Sievers, Grootfontein 3 Apr. 1934. 29. RKA 6695, 49, Telegram from Gertrud Wallberg, Windhoek, 27 Feb. 1934 to Boemcken, Berlin, copy submitted by Fricke to the Colonial Division of the foreign minstry. 30. “Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance” WAd 1470 (31 Jan. 1934); “Triple Shooting Affair,” WAd 1477 (24 Feb. 1934); Eberhard, Zwischen, 258–59. A former member shot a rival Nazi and his wife before killing himself. 31. Eberhardt, Zwischen, 260–62, 271–72; Walther, Creating Germans Abroad, 172; Venghiattis, “Mobilizing,” 390–91; NAN, A.221 160 90/32, Boemcken to Voigts, 5 Oct. 1934. 32. Venghiattis, “Mobilizing,” 318–27. Quote from NAN A.221 160 90/32, Steinmeister to Voigts, 24 July 1934; and Steinmeister added more on establishing libraries and reading circles 3 Aug. 1934. 33. NAN A.221 160 90/32, Quote from Voigts to Boemcken 30 Nov. 1933. Director of the Windhoek Oberrealeschule, Wallberg also was copied. 34. NAN A.221 155 90/6, Quote from Abteilung Keetmanshoop, L. Lohff, 11 Sept. 1934. See also Pfarrer Wittmann to Voigts, 26 June 1934. The list marked the names of German children as “Arischer” (Aryan). Nonetheless Voigts defended the decision to retain the current Jewish members in the local league chapter, Venghiattis, “Mobilizing,” 404–405. 35. NAN A.221 160 90/32, Boemcken to Voigts, 30 Jan., 10 Feb., and 27 Feb. 1934. The foreign ministry notice to the league of the one-time state funding: RKA 6695, 50, 3 Apr. 1934. Quote from NAN A.221 159 90/28, Voigts, Niederschrift der Verhandlungen auf der Gauverbandstagung 18 Aug. 1934. 36. RKA 6695, 59–60, Report of the meeting, 12 Apr. 1934, and RKA 6695, 54-57, P.g. Lasser to Frick, foreign ministry, 3 Feb. 1934 complains at length about the League’s reactionary elitism ignored the needs of “‘einfacher’ Volksschichten,” (quote on 55); NAN A.221160 90/32, Boemcken to Voigts, 9 Apr. 1934 and 16 May 1934. NAN 154 90/3, Abteilung Grootfontein, Nazi Toni Klatt also alleged that the Women’s League historically had distributed Christmas gifts to all the members, including the well to do, and not the truly needy. 37. Quote from NAN A.221 160. 90/32, Boemcken to Voigts, 15 May 1934. 38. Quote from NAN A.221 160. 90/32, Boemcken to Voigts, 29 May 1934; emphasis in original. 39. NAN A.221 154 90/3, Abteilung Grootfontein. Voigts to Frau Julie Sievers, Grootfontein 3 Apr. 1934.

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40. NAN A.221 155 90/9, Abteilung Lüderitzbucht. Voigts to Kraus, 2 May 1934, no date, Aug. 1934, and 6 Dec. 1934. Three new heads rapidly followed between 1934 and 1936; first quote from Sigwart and second from Käthe Uhlmann, Okahandja, excerpted by Frau von Boemcken 20 and 21 May 1934 to Voigts (NAN A22.160. 90/32). Emphasis in original. 41. NAN A.221 160 90/32, Boemcken to Voigts 29 Jan. 1934. 42. NAN A.221 160 90/32, Boemcken to Voigts 15 May 1934; Abschrift, Chapter head Rosa Römer to von Schauroth 1 June 1934 describes the local particulars. Venghiattis, “Mobilizing,” 355–56. 43. For example, Eberhardt, Zwischen, 377–78; Grosse, “What Does German Colonialism,” 128–31; and Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, “Race Power in Post-Colonial Germany: The German Africa Show and the National Socialist State, 1935–1940,” in Ames, Klotz and Wildenthal, Germany’s Colonial Pasts, 172–79. 44. Quote from NAN A.221 159 90/28, Voigts, League Gauverbandstagung 18 Aug. 1934. 45. Quote from NAN A.221 159 90/28, Voigts, League Gauverbandstagung 18 Aug. 1934. 46. Eberhardt, Zwischen, 272–81. 47. Eberhardt, Zwischen, 272–81. NAN A.221 90/32, Boemcken to Voigts, 5 Oct. 1934 on Voigts’s role in Bund deutscher Mädels. 48. Quote from NAN A.221 160 90/32, Boemcken to Voigts, 5 Oct. 1934. 49. Süchtig-Hänger, Das “Gewissen der Nation,” 376–77 and Sandler, “‘Colonizers Are Born,’” 118–19 and Sandler, Empire in the Heimat, 95–97. 50. Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich, 247–48; Sandler, “Colonizers Are Born,” 222–33. 51. “Arbeitsberichtes des Reichs-Kolonialbundes Abteilung IV und zugleich Rückschau das letzte Arbeitsjahr des Frauenbundes der Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft i. Li,” FK (1 Oct. 1936): 149–51; Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich, esp. 360ff. 52. Quote from RKA 6695, 208, Boemcken, league circular, dated 28 May 1936. 53. RKA 6695, 207-209, Boemcken, league circular, dated 28 May 1936. 54. “Arbeitsberichtes des Reichs-Kolonialbundes,” 149–50. Schilling, Postcolonial Germany, explores how Nazi colonial efforts successfully pervaded German classrooms and schoolbooks. Evidence here indicates the league spread of Nazi educational propaganda overseas. 55. “Arbeitsberichtes des Reichs-Kolonialbundes,” 149–50. 56. Heinemann, What Difference, 32–48; Mouton, From Nurturing the Nation, chap. 3. 57. “Arbeitsberichtes des Reichs-Kolonialbundes,” 150–51. 58. Baronowsky, Nazi Empire; Harvey, Women and the Nazi East; Kundrus, “Colonialism, Imperialism,” 336–42, in Naranch and Eley, German Colonialism. The magazine featured monthly reports from chapters. The description of the event appears in “Aus den Abteilungen: Berichte,” FK no. 1 (1 Jan. 1937): 15. 59. Quote from “Aus den Abteilungen: Berichte,” FK no. 3 (1 Mar. 1937): 45, regarding chapter in Aachen. 60. Quote from “Aus den Abteilungen: Berichte,” FK (1 Feb. 1938): 32, Dortmund, depicts chapter events from December 1937 supporting the Nazi Mothers’ schools. 61. “Rundschau: Weinachtsspende der Afrikadeutschen für das Sudetenendeutsche Hilfswerk,” FK (1 Dec. 1938): 194. “Reichskolonialtagung in Bremen, 26–29. Mai 1938: Arbeitsbericht der Abteilung IV für das Jahr 1937,” FK (1 June 1938): 85, mentions fifty crates. 62. Aus den Abteilungen: Berichte,” FK (1 Feb. 1938): 32, Dortmund offered Ernst Nigmann’s Schwarze Schwänke: Fröhlichen Geschichten aus unserem alten Östafrika as accurate ethnographic representations of Southwest Africa. Sandler, “‘Colonizers Are Born,’” 25, 43, 55, 268, notes in 1938 Rudolf Hess capped the Reich Colonial League at a million members, signifying a mass movement. In 1941, the cap rose to 2  million, but by March 1943 the colonial movement was defunct, after Hitler ordered total war effort. Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland, 291–92 describes the Nazi mother’s schools, the only official training for new mothers allowed after 1935.

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63. Quote from Eva MacLean, “Das koloniale Frauenschaffen,” FK (1 Jan. 1939): 1. The German Women’s Bureau’s spokesperson Marta Unger’s speech pledges her organization’s support. See the full report in the following issue on the “Reichskolonialtagung in Bremen,” FK (1 July 1938): 101–4. 64. Quote from MacLean, “Das koloniale Frauenschaffen.” 65. Venghiattis, “Mobilizing,” 364–65. 66. “Aus der Arbeit: Berichtigung,” FK (1 July 1939): 123. 67. Willeke Sandler, Empire in the Heimat: Colonialism and Public Culture in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 280–90. 68. Statistics from Women’s League annual reports, Jahresbericht (1930–31), 7; and Jahresbericht (1932), 18–19; Jahresbericht (1933–34), 24. 69. Quote from pamphlets: Women’s League, Kolonialfrauenarbeit (1931), 8. Women’s League, “Auswandererhilfe und Stellenvermittelung für weibliche Auswanderer,” Jahresbericht (1931–32): 19. The annual league report through June 1932 is found at the end of 25. Jahre Kolonialfrauenarbeit (1932). 70. Pamphlet. Frauenbund der Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, “Auswandererhilfe und Stellenvermittelung für weibliche Auswanderer,” Jahresbericht [Women’s League Annual Report] (1931–32): 18–19. “Eine Warnung für junge Mädchen,” SZ (27 Jan. 1934) ; A.221 160 90/32 Voigts’ correspondence with a Rendsburg graduate in South West Africa contains gossip about another former Rendsburg student named Erika Holmgren who worked in a South African family (“Jews who became mean when Hitler came to power”) as well as an English mistress who became violent and eventually fired her. 71. Quote from NAN A.221 160 90/32, Voigts to Frau Martha Thimme, Zeitz, 28 Dec.1933. 72. NAN A.221 160 90/32, Voigts to Frau Martha Thimme, Zeitz, 28 Dec.1933. 73. NAN A.221 161 90/35, Letter from Werner Röber, Hamburg to Nora von Steinmeister, 8 June 1935 uses the term “Abenteuerinnen [adventuresses].” 74. Sohie von Uhde, Deutsche unterm Kreuz des Südens: bei den Kolonialsiedlern in Südwest und Ostafrika (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1934). 75. Arbeitsbericht der Abteilung IV und zugleich Rückschau auf der letzte Arbeitsjahr des Frauenbundes der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft i. Li,” FK (1 Oct 1936): 149–51. Thom’s doctorate was in education. 76. “Arbeitsbericht der Abteilung IV für das Jahr 1937,” FK (1 June, 1938), 81–83. The league journal was renamed in 1937; NAN A.221 154 90/3, Voigts to Chapter head Frau Dr. Klatt, Farm Ossa, Post Grootfontein, 9 Nov. 1935. 77. NAN A.221 168 90/61, Richtlinien für Reisbeihilfen zur Ausreise nach den alten deutschen Kolonien, 1 Dec. 1938. The deposit seems to have risen to £100 in 1937. 78. NAN A.221 161 90/37, Abschrift. German Embassy Pretoria 23 Dec. 1937 to the German Consulate Windhoek. Dr. Emmi Schmidt on 7 Oct. 1938 warns that young women should not enter on temporary permits, 161 90/34. To Dr. Thom, Division IV, Reich Colonial League, from Windhoek. 79. “Jahresbericht 1939 der Abteilung IV,” FK (1 Jan. 1940): 1–3. (Quote, 2). 80. “Die Farmstütze trifft ein,” FK (1 July 1939): 126; “Jahresbericht 1939 der Abteilung IV,” FK (1 Jan. 1940): 1–3; NAN A.221 161 90/34. Emmy Schmidt wrote to H. Thom in Division IV on 8 Sept. 1938: “For the upcoming work in question, in the main there are enough South-Western girls here who know the people and conditions, and therefore are at an advantage. Teachers are in short supply, since apparently no more will be admitted.” 81. “Jahresbericht 1939”; Eva Goebbels, “Hedwig Heyl Haushaultungschule in Windhuk: Entstehung und Arbeit,” FK (1 Mar. 1939): 39–41; NAN A.221 154 90/4, Hochfeld 18 Apr. 1939; NAN A.221 163.90/44, application of Henny B. 1936 makes mention of her son in Naumburg. 82. NAN A.221 154 90/1, Bethanien chapter head Antonie Kleimanhagen, Tsirub, to Gauverband Windhoek, 20 Oct. 1938.

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83. NAN A.221 163 90/44, Voigts’s correspondence with director Dr. Körner at Rendsburg fulfilling the request for a Nazi graduate from his school to work for Henny B., a widow from Rehoboth in Germany, for the Berlin Olympics and Nuremburg Rally 17 and 30 Aug. 1936. 84. NAN A.221 155 90/9, Abteilung Lüderitzbucht, c.v. Doris O. on 5 Dec. 1935 and Voigts’s letter to Frl. O. 23 July 1936; 5 Mar. and 14 June 1937 regarding an immigrant’s refusal to discharge her debt to the Reich Colonial League. 85. NAN A.221 159 90/28, Annual Southwest African Women’s League Gauverbandstagung section on Schulbeihilfe für 1937; and Gauverbandstagung 1936, which notes cuts in educational subsidies and exchange student grants after 1936 due to the Reich’s poor exchange rates. Quote from A.221 155 90/6 Wittmann, Abteilung Keetmanshoop 27 Dec. 1938 and 18 Jan. 1938 depicts the family and the difficulty of other local families to afford the schools in Lüderitzbucht. 86. Eberhardt, Zwischen, 436. 87. Quoted from NAN A.221 161 90/34, Schmidt to the RKA Division IV, Fln. Beindorf (marked personal). 1 Nov 1938; and 154 90/4, Abteilung Hochfeld, Chair Luise Sell to Voigts, 2 Apr. 1938. 88. Quote from NAN A.221 154 90/3, Voigts to Frau Dr. Klatt, Post Grootfontein, 9 Nov. 1935. 89. Venghiattis, “Mobilizing,” 402–6. 90. Eberhardt, Zwischen, 410–14; Robert Gordon, “Impact of the Second World War on Namibia,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 19 (1993): 150. 91. NAN A.221 154 90/4, Abteilung Hochfeld, Chair Luise Sell, 7 Oct and 10 Oct., 1939. 92. Eberhardt, Zwischen, 414–15. 93. Eberhardt, Zwischen, 437–51; Brigitta Schmidt-Laube, “Die verkehrte Hautfarbe”: Ethnizität deutscher Namibier als Alltags Praxis (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1998): 147–77.



Conclusion

This study has examined the history of radical German biopolitical and racial policies in the settler society of South West Africa to trace sexual and racial power and violence in the territory, as well as to consider its influence on the radicalization of the German colonial movement in the first half of the twentieth century. From the late 1890s on, German state officials and colonial lobbyists in the German Colonial Society joined forces to promote German women’s settlement in South West Africa for racial ends. Within Germany itself, the extremist German colonialists and state officials sought to recruit German women as servants of colonialism and racial-reproductive maternalism. The ongoing German Foreign and Colonial Ministry support for white settlement and pronatalism South West Africa persisted through 1914, resumed in the mid-1920s through the Nazi era, and lasted until the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Racially directed German colonialist biopolitics championed subsidized German women’s settlement in South West Africa to serve German family formation and pronatalism, while reinforcing violence and negative eugenics against Africans. The long history of sponsored German women’s settlement in South West Africa underpinned legal bans on interracial marriage in the territory, strengthening local settlers’ racial and ethnic identities, and inflaming interracial conflict and violence in the territory. German colonialists’ biopolitics directly supported and enabled German settlers’ systemic genocide against the region’s African populations. Within Wilhelmine Germany, moderate feminists including Minna Cauer, as well as anticolonial politicians, particularly August Bebel of the SPD, drove sustained German opposition to the Colonial Society’s women’s settlement scheme. Bebel defeated state funding for the program, deriding the effort as a sexually exploitative form of colonial fanaticism. The German colonial movement pushed ahead with settlement efforts in the face of the mass public outcry. Instead, German colonial officials and influential German Colonial Society secured funds through a special state concession lottery to promote settler welfare in the colonies (although German officials did little to ensure the welfare of the sponsored German women settlers in South West Africa). German colonial officials’ collusion with the Colo-

conclusion | 311

nial Society bypassed the Reichstag and democratic limits on state power, enlisting the German state directly and indirectly in support of extremist racial policies in South West Africa. The many secretive policies that German colonialist and state official pursued over the course of German women’s settlement efforts sought to disguise controversial state support for biopolitics to frustrate German anticolonialists and veil the Weimar and Nazi resumption of German biopolitics in the former colonies, which impinged on mandate territory. Archival records not only expose the hidden cooperation between German colonialists and officials, but also reveal disturbing details of settler women’s experiences. While colonialists celebrated when newly arrived settler women acclimated and married in the territory, closer scrutiny demonstrates that many of them suffered divorce, degradation, and violence in the hyper-male settler community in South West Africa. South West African settlers condemned through vicious gossip the sponsored servant women as immodest and self-advancing. Surviving accounts of German settler community’s spread of hearsay and rumors offer us an important source for interpreting local social relations, demonstrating how German settler women disrupted the sexual and moral economy of the colonial community, and challenged its assumptions about race, class, gender, and sexuality. Though German settlers sometimes dismissed and mocked sponsored settler women as a group, they did not underestimate the program’s significance for biopolitics in the territory.

Settlement Policies and the Race War From the late 1890s, German women’s settlement was integral to the German colonial movement’s long-term aim to establish lasting settler colonialism in South West Africa. They enabled white-family formation and homesteading, which displaced African populations and threatened their survival. In particular, these women assisted a growing population of economically marginal German settlers who relocated to traditional Herero and Nama pasturelands. German colonial administrators began to impose a native reserve system, triggering the Herero and Nama Wars (1904–7). African soldiers attacked isolated German homesteads in the initial stages of these wars; though the African combatants largely spared white women, they killed more than one hundred settler men. Though the sponsored settler women represented a minority of the settler population, their names were prominent in the casualty records of settlers killed and captured in these attacks. Despite the German colonial administration’s role in encouraging German homesteading that exposed settlers to danger, the alleged victimization of German women served as key justification for the so-called chivalric German atrocities against the Herero and Nama, and mobilized German support for the ensuing

312 | the servants of empire

colonial race war that led to mass German killings and mistreatment of African populations. The German military strategy in South West Africa wiped out the majority of its African population through force or attrition, then compelled the survivors into economic servitude to white-owned enterprises, farms, and households. The war prompted the German colonial administration and settlers to stiffen their opposition to interracial unions between German men and women of color, as well as to resume German women’s settlement. Settler organizations expelled male members living in interracial households, and the Windhoek parish segregated its kindergarten. Despite colonial administrators’ sanctions against intermarriages, German men’s liaisons and rapes of African women continued to swell the numbers of biracial births, even as African births declined in the ongoing genocide. German administrators and colonialists also pushed for renewed sponsorship of German women to South West Africa, as German settlement and economic development followed the wars. In Germany by 1907, patriotic clubwomen who served the war efforts in the colonies had formed a colonialist Women’s League, which soon joined as an auxiliary to the male-dominated German Colonial Society. German women embraced expanded roles in the nation through the colonial movement, as they championed the cultural contributions of German women in African territories. The colonialist women leaders of the league aided in the selection of unmarried German maids as prospective settler brides for South West Africa. However, male leaders in the German Colonial Society and colonial administrators continued to direct settlement policies along eugenic lines, and discouraged the league’s preference to recruit educated and professional German women for South West Africa by claiming refined women were unsuitable marriage partners for male German homesteaders. In the wake of the rebellions, which some extreme German colonialist men and women interpreted as an ongoing race war between Germans and Africans, the German Colonial Society and colonial administrators not only encouraged women’s settlement, but also expanded segregated kindergartens and maternity care for settlers’ children in South West Africa during the ongoing genocide of Africans. German colonialists continued their active support for German settlement, family formation, and pronatalism in the territory even as captive African populations continued to plummet. The resulting shortage of African laborers increased demand for white maids to work in settler homes. In this era the Women’s League leadership generally conceded to the expertise of male colonialists in determining women’s settlement policies, even at the expense of their organization’s interests and the needs of the women they sponsored to Africa. In 1910 German officials successfully pressured the league to site its dormitory in Keetmanshoop, a town with one of the highest rates of biracial births, but with limited demand for white servants and low wages in the district.

conclusion | 313

Gossip, Scares, and Violence During this period white settlers often expressed their racial and sexual fears in rumors and scares. Local rumors and moral panics directly informed the specific patterns of racial and sexual violence in the territory. In South West Africa in the final years of German rule racial and sexual tensions remained high, as settlers remained deeply anxious about signs of African collective resistance or revolt. German settler men asserted their patriarchal authority to exact corporal discipline on African male employees in order to quell insubordination, and justified the use of excessive violence as their patriarchal right. Settler men also invoked a culture of chivalry in defending female family members, which they claimed motivated their violence against Africans and that served as a mitigating factor in courts of law to excuse their use of deadly force. Given the decline in the African population and workforce, German authorities were most likely to intervene in abuse against African women, especially pregnant women. German women also voiced support for corporal discipline against unruly Africans. Those who lacked servants also decried administrators’ favoritism in allowing childbearing African women to escape compulsory employment policies in order to tend to their own families. Rumors alleged widespread African maids’ rebelliousness and violence toward German housewives, and a few Germans claimed African were secretly plotting poisonings against settlers. The poisoning scare expressed settlers’ racial paranoia, which resulted in several cases of deadly assaults on African workers. The poisoning scare signaled German settlers’ increasing association of Africans as sources of danger, sexual disease, and racial pollution. In 1912 further unsubstantiated rumors of a teenage African servant boy’s suspected molestations and infection of a young white girl with venereal disease resulted in a full-blown moral panic, which led German community leaders to demand greater protections for white children’s welfare and to condemn working-class German settlers’ immorality as a corrupting influence on the colony. Damaging gossip surrounding sponsored German women in South West Africa undermined settler support for German servants’ continued immigration, and the reputation of the Women’s League as well. German settlers regarded the maid’s dormitory as a source of continual community scandal. As settlers’ scrutiny of white women increased during this era, a number of German settler women suffered mental illnesses, self-harmed, and were socially ostracized. Rumors of unmarried pregnancies and abortions in the home finally reached the ears of Colonial Society leaders and jeopardized its continued support for German women’s settlement. The society began negotiating to grant Women’s League’s autonomy in directing women’s settlement in Africa. Colonial administrators conducted a study of the subsidized settlers through 1910, which revealed that only half of the sponsored servant women remained in South West Africa. However, World War I halted the program abruptly, and shielded the Colonial Society from public exposure of these

314 | the servants of empire

disappointing outcomes after Germany lost its overseas colonies in the war. The Colonial Society distanced itself from the support of German women’s settlement in the postwar era. Though German women’s settlement in South West Africa through 1914 did not significantly increase the white population, nor reduce the biracial population in South West Africa, its most obvious impact of colonialists’ biopolitics came through colonialists’ circulation of radical race and pronatalist propaganda. Colonialist agitation helped spread anti-black attitudes and white racial awareness from South West Africa to Germany. German Reichstag debates over colonial racial policies and German citizenship reflected colonialist influences, although the majority of deputies opposed both colonial racial bans and the introduction of racialized citizenship criteria for Germans. In addition, German racial scientists also cited the German women’s sponsored colonization as proof that Germany should pursue eugenic marriage promotion, and that German diasporic communities around the globe could retain their German ethnic character (Volkstum) through selective German women’s settlement.

Colonial Biopolitics in the Post-Colonial Era Although the Women’s League joined the other colonialist organizations in serving the general German war effort and aided displaced and needy Germans during World War I, the league declined rapidly following the loss of the colonies and hyperinflation. Colonialist thought continued to permeate German culture. Historians detect the impact of radical colonialist racial influences in the German Black Horror on the Rhine Campaign against French occupation forces in the early 1920s as another signal of organized colonialism’s lasting influence within Weimar Germany. While these trends encouraged Weimar Germans to draw on colonialist thought in new ways, I contend that the Women’s League had little influence in this regard in the early 1920s. However, once German colonial sympathizers in the Weimar bureaucracy mobilized to win back the former colonies in Africa, they channeled direct state funding to colonial organizations including the league. Their renewed state support for German settlement in the mandate of South West Africa aimed to establish and mobilize a majority German community to restore the territory to German control. State grants to the Women’s League promote renewed German women’s settlement, family formation, and pronatalism in South West Africa. Direct state funding extended to the Rendsburg Women’s Colonial School, overseas schools for German settler children in Africa, and mass colonialist propaganda in Germany quickly followed. From 1926 on the Women’s League recruited a new generation of German brides for German settler men, and enlisted German clubwomen in South West Africa to help these women acclimate. The Women’s League continued to spread

conclusion | 315

pronatalist, racist, and radical nationalist colonialist propaganda from Germany to the territory, as well as to provide material support for German settler families in the region. The strengthening of diasporic ties united German colonialist women in the homeland and in South West Africa. The league assisted German settlers in pursuing Weimar biopolitics in the mandate South West Africa, where they continued and even strengthened the long history of violent settler ethnic and racial separatism. The majority of German settlers in the territory supported apartheid policies in the mandate from the 1920s as a bulwark to support common white interests and suppress African resistance. In Germany and in South West Africa many colonialists welcomed Hitler’s seizure of power. Thanks to the long history of colonial biopolitics, some German settlers in South West Africa identified with Nazis’ ethnic and racial extremism, and were sympathetic to pronatalism and negative eugenics as well. German settlers interpreted Hitler’s expansionistic foreign ambitions as a signal that he might force the return South West Africa to German control. Nazi women in the colonialist movement underscored similarities between settler colonialism with Nazism by reinterpreting the historic colonial bans on interracial marriages and efforts for white women’s settlement in South West Africa as foundational to Nazi biopolitics. The Women’s League leadership supported Nazi Party infiltration within South West Africa, urging local members’ obedience to local party leaders. However, the Nazi movement also created divisions among Germans in the mandate, as the party displaced former leaders of the German settler community. In 1934, however, mandate authorities suppressed Nazi organizations and outlawed the party, yet Women’s League clubwomen continued to promote Nazism, subsidizing German settler children’s study in Nazi Germany, assisting Nazi women as educators and child-care workers to South West Africa, and circulating Nazi literature throughout South West Africa up until the start of World War II in 1939. After 1936 Reich Colonial League absorbed the other German colonialist organizations and placed German women’s colonial activism under male colonialists’ control. The Reich Colonial League successfully redirected the league’s former members and the Women’s Colonial School in Rendsburg from its colonial activism in the former African colonies toward efforts to extend Nazi biopolitics in territories in the borderlands of Central and Eastern Europe. German settlers in Africa saw little gain from this foreign policy shift to the east, which also diverted Nazi aid from their region. After the outbreak of World War II, Germans in South West Africa were cut off from Nazi Germany and many Nazi men were interned. In the postwar era, Germans remained racially and ethnically aware, and joined with other white ethnicities to support legislation establishing apartheid in South West Africa. The most lasting impact of historical German biopolitics in South West Africa is evident in the persistence of Namibian German ethnic, class, gender, and racial self-identity, which German women worked to maintain and reproduce, particularly through their relations with African servants.



Appendix

Table A.1. White Population of South West Africa, 1897–1913. Year

Men

Women

Children

Totals

1891

246

59

193

498

1892

199

48

375

622

1893

225

55

278

558

1894

573

78

318

969

1895

917

190

625

1,732

1896

1,080

209

703

1,992

1897

1,564

310

754

2,628

1898

1,532

291

676

2,499

1899

1,840

306

681

2,827

1900

2,146

403

790

3,339

1901

2,181

481

945

3,607

1902

2,569

633

1433

4,635

1903

2,804

670

1166

4,640

1906

4,842

717

807

6,366

1907

4,899

1079

1132

7,110

1908

5,295

1491

1427

8,213

1909

8,010

1826

1955

11,791

1910

8,451

2173

2311

12,935

1911

8,915

2468

2579

13,962

1912

9,046

2808

2962

14,816

1913

8,530

3058

3242

14,830

1904 1905

Source: Boge-Smidt, “Germania,” 430, “Table 1: The White Population, 1891–1913.” Note: No census data available for 1904 through 1905.

appendix | 317

0

0

12

1

0

20

Total

1

Type Not Known

1

Childα

1

Female Labor

2

Other Male Kin

Sons

2

Other Female Kin

Daughters

Sisters & Sisters-in-law

Brides

1898

Wives

Year

Table A.2. Settlers Sponsored by the Colonial Society, Categorized by Relationship to Colonial Sponsor and Listed by Year of Departure from Germany, 1898–1914.

1899

0

3

0

0

5

1

4

10

0

0

23

1900

4

8

2

3

3

1

0

0

0

0

21

1901

5

11

1

0

2

0

0

0

0

0

19

1902

6

7

2

4

6

1

4

1

0

0

31

1903

6

12

1

0

5

1

3

6

0

1

35

1904

9

3

3

2

4

0

0

2

0

0

23

1905

12

4

17

2

6

3

3

9

0

1

57

1906

23

16

14

15

4

5

1

23

3

2

106

1907

42

15

23

25

3

5

1

48

2

0

164

1908

30

27

32

19

10

5

0

56

1

0

180

1909

32

21

27

28

17

8

1

73

0

0

207

1910

41

19

26

37

14

11

3

74

3

0

228

1911

56

15

55

42

14

4

3

99

0

0

288

1912

40

27

37

31

22

14

3

113

0

0

287

65

20

45

43

28

16

3

116

1

3

340

19

14

17

15

6

4

0

73

0

90

238

1

0

0

1

2

0

0

0

0

1

5

393 224 303 268

152

79

29

715

11

1913 β

1914

Year not known Totals

98 2,272

Sources: BAB, DKG 153-160, 172-4 and 182-3; BAB, D.S.W.A., 1083.L.11.m.1 bis m.2, Erhebung über das Ergehen der mit Unterstützung der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft Übergesiedelten Personen: Hauptverzeichnisse, Unterlagen. Note: αChild column indicates progeny whose sex was not a matter of record. βCount is based on incomplete records, which may mis-indicate or not indicate the type of sponsored immigrant.

318 | appendix

Table A.3. Records on the First Sponsored Servants, 1898–99. Name

Employers

Husband or Fiancé’s Work

Outcome

Sponsored servants from November 1898 1.

Therese Lange

1. Private household Sergeant 2. Restauranteur

Returned to Germany unmarried.

2.

Julie Kuhn

———

Carpentercabinetmaker

Married and divorced quickly. Resumed domestic service.

3.

Luise Schrader

Firm

Farmer/ merchant

Married and moved to a farm.

4.

Lina Jung

Private household

Farmer

Married and returned to Germany.

5.

Helene Wolff Private household

6.

Paula Stanczitzki

1. Private household ——— 2. Merchant

7.

Wilhelmine Liffinsky

Private household

8.

Hedwig Geyh

1. Private household Smith 2. Firm

9.

Hildegard Parsche

Private household

Restauranteur Married and moved to a farm. Returned to Germany unmarried.

Harnessmaker Married and moved to Dorstrivier with husband. Three broken engagements. Married and moved to Heusis.

Master mason Married, remained in Windhoek.

10. Marie Zülchner

1. Private household Farmer/ 2. Merchant trader

Widowed and wounded in Herero War. Remarried to small-scale farmer.

11.

Else Vormschlag

Private household

Cabinetmaker Married and gave birth, then returned to Germany with family.

12. Lida Blohm

Private household

Farmer

Married and moved to husband’s farm. Widowed, but remained in South West Africa.

appendix | 319

Sponsored servants from November 1899 13. Margarete Gaedecke

Private household

———

14. Anna Weigel 1. Private household Merchant 2. Restauranteur

Became independent seamstress. Migrated to Cape Colony in 1900, eventually returned to Europe. Married and moved to Kuibis.

15. Elisabetha Amend

Baker

Restauranteur Married and moved to Nonidas. In 1910 divorced, and returned to Europe.

16. Franziska Ganswindt

Private household

Army signalist Returned to Germany unmarried.

17. Emma Jähnisch

Merchant

Farmer

Married and moved to Farm Fahlwater near Otjimbingwe.

18. Bertha Jähnisch

Firm

customs official

Married and returned to Germany.

19. Anna Hauschild

Hotel

Sergeant

Returned to Germany unmarried/Rumored engaged..

20. Eva Schneider

1. Restauranteur 2. Land Company

Steamship officer

Broke off engagement. No record after 1900.

21. Hedwig Matz

———

———

Kept house for her brother instead of paid employment. Returned to Germany unmarried.

22. Ida Hille

Merchant

Mason

Widowed in Herero War and returned to Germany.

Sources: D.K.G. 172-4; 182-3 and D.S.W.A. 1083.L.11.m.1 bis m.2. (Erhebung über das Ergehen der mit Unterstützung der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft übergesiedelten Personen: - Hauptverzeichnisse, Unterlagen.)

320 | appendix

Table A.4. Census Records on the Family Status of White Men in South West Africa, 1891–1913. Single and Widowed

Married to White Woman (Resident + Absent)

Year

#

#

1891

146

59.3

1892

116

1893

%

#

%

59

24.0

41

16.7

57.8

45

22.6

39

19.6

131

58.2

57

25.3

37

16.4

1894

473

82.5

64

11.2

36

6.3

1895

706

77.0

169

18.4

42

4.6

1896

854

79.1

193

17.9

33

3.1

1897

1,256

80.3

276

17.6

32

21

1898

1,222

79.8

265

17.3

45

2.9

1899

1,518

82.5

277

15.1

45

2.4

1900

1,772

82.6

325

15.1

49

2.3

1901

1,763

80.8

382

17.5

36

1.7

1902

1,891

77.1

549

21.4

39

1.5

1903

2,182

77.8

580

20.7

42

1.5

No

Data

1907

3,895

79.5

965

1908

3,941

74.4

1909

6,436

1910

1904–6

%

Married to African Woman

Total (resident+absent)

colonial wars

(745+220)

19.7

39

.8

1,312

(1,057+255)

24.8

42

.8

80.3

1,524

(1,320+204)

19.0

50

.6

6,730

79.6

1,675

(1,496+179

19.8

46

.5

1911

6,696

75.1

2,184

(1,749+435)

24.5

35

.4

1912

6,608

73.0

2,391

(1,970+421)

26.4

47

.5

1913

6,016

70.5

2,468

(2,121+347)

28.9

46

.3

Source: Source: Boge-Smidt, “Germania,” table 1b, p. 431. Note: No census data available for 1904 through 1906. Data for 1907–8 do not include the dependents of the protectorate military force. Data for 1907–13 includes breakdown of married men whose wives are resident and absent. The Second Afrikaner War of 1899–1902 temporarily increased Afrikaner population.

appendix | 321

Table A.5. 1912 Colonial Census Records: White and Mixed-Race Children, by District. Mixed Race Persons District

Children

Whites

Total Population

Children

Total Population

Grootfontein

88

90

140

779

Outjo

64

68

52

250

Omaruru

96

107

167

728

142

183

254

1016

Okahandja

95

95

118

571

Gobabis

45

51

70

336

Windhoek

133

164

595

2460

Rehoboth

173

206

75

500

Gibeon

53

68

249

779

Maltahöhe

50

50

98

1103

215

275

312

1124

Bethanien

49

56

54

251

Warmbad

147

181

180

499

Lüderitzbucht

23

30

260

1639

Swakopmund

17

22

338

1387

1390

1646

2962

13422

Karibib

Keetmanshoop

totals

Source: Deutsches Kolonial-Handbuch, 13th edition. Teil II. Südwest Africa (Berlin: Paetel, 1913), 2.

Table A.6. Population of South West Africa, 1913–46. Whites’ Ethnic Breakdown (Inferred (by language) African population) German Afrikaans English Other

Total population

Total whites

1913

213,000

14,830

198,170

12,292

1,600

1921

223,665

19,714

203,951

7,855

———

——— ———

1926

———

———

———

8,875

11,359

3,817 ———

1936

320,457

31,200

289,257

9,779

18,376

2,722

323

1946

352,464

38,504

313,960

9,177

25,674

3,258

395

170

768

Source: Oliver Diepes, “Deutscher Nationalismus in Südwestafrika zwischen den Weltkriegen, 1915– 1939,” (M.A. thesis, University of Cologne, 1996), 87.

322 | appendix

Table A.7. Subsidized German Women’s Colonization to East Africa and South West Africa, 1926–36. Totals Year

1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936

Total

7

95

120

94

35

51

33

36

41

47

103

662

To SW Africa

5

75

100

69

27

29

18

14

20

29

75

461

To East Africa

0

15

20

15

4

20

15

22

20

18

28

177

71% 79% 83% 73% 77% 57% 55% 39% 49% 62% 73%

70%

% to South West Africa Passage alone

6

78

84

76

21

45

30

35

36

28

65

504

Passage & Job

1

17

36

18

14

6

3

1

5

19

38

158

% Employees

14%

18% 30% 19% 40% 12%

9%

3%

12%

19% 38%

24%

Types of Migrant/Employment Business/ Farm

totals

2

2

Seamstress

2

2

Nurse

2

2

Other

3

9

4

8

3

5

1

1

Tutor

2

3

10

8

7

3

2

3

2

7

12

59

Household

3

34

58

40

13

15

14

11

10

18

49

265

2

9

8

1

1

1

4

26

Hotel Employees

n=373

Bride

6

7

10

3

6

1

4

3

3

7

26

Child

24

17

12

8

9

8

8

13

6

9

50

Wife

26

17

13

3

15

8

8

13

10

12

114

Relations Total

n=289 7

95

120

94

35

51

33

36

41

47

103

662

Source: Reichskolonialbund Division IV annual report 1936 published in Deutsche Frauen in den Kolonien (October 1936), 149–51



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 Index

Africa House, 238 African women corporal punishment and, 141–42 corporal punishment ban for, 126, 131 historical background on, 126–27 racial violence directed at, 132–35 as servants, 127 servants of Cramer, 135–36 sexuality of, 142–43 white attitudes toward, 147n56 white employment resisted by, 129–32 white male sexual contact with, 105–8, 244 agricultural production, gender and, 129–30 Aliens Act of 1937, 298 Alldeutscher Verband (Pan German Society), 13 Anglo-Afrikaner War, 68 Angola, 11–12 antifeminism, 32–33, 92 Anti-Nazi Law, 283 anti-Semitism, 279–80 apartheid, 244 expansion of, 8 Nazism and, 303 Arenberg, Franz von (Prince) on prisoner exchange proposal, 30 on racial mixing, 27–28 Armadale Castle, 219 Arnim, Berndt von, 45, 46 Bail, Max, 97–99 Bambusinnenwirtschaft, 132 Barmen Missionary Society (South West African Barmer Missionsgesellschaft), 29 Battle of Waterberg, 73 Bauer, Karl, 224 Bebel, August, 28, 29–30, 41, 45, 81–82

German Colonial Society attacked by, 57–58, 67, 79–80 on marriage, 59, 63–64 Berger, Iris, 122n74 Berlin Universal Exhibition, 29 Berlin Women’s Welfare Association (Berlin Verein Frauenwohl), 40, 55n38 biopolitics, in post-colonial era, 314–15 biopower, 7–10 biracial people. See mixed race individuals Bismarck, Otto von, 10–11 black peril scares, 142, 313–14 German South West African Newspaper perpetuating, 150–51 Omaruru Case as, 159–60 Rust perpetuating, 148–49 Boemcken, Agnes von, 272, 280, 290–91, 303–4 in NSDAP, 276–77 Voigts and, 286–87, 291 Boemcken, Julius von, in NSDAP, 276–77 Boettischer, Else von. See Frobenius Böhmer (officer), 168 Böhmer, Rudolph, 113 Bondelswarts, 74 Bormann, Wilhelm, 210 Bortfeld, Karla, 262 Botha, Louis, 220–21, 224–25 Brakwater Farm, 183–85, 191, 223 Braun, Lili, 119n35 Bredow, Hedwig von, 231, 247 Brenner, Fritz, 278–79 British East India Company, 11 Brockmann, Clara, 127 Bruck, Felix Friedrich, on German women’s settlement project, 34 Buchka, Gerhard von, 45 Bülow, Franz Joseph von, on German women’s settlement project, 34 Busse, Max, 36

index | 339

on German women, 31–32 on settler colonialism, 31–32 Cape Colony, 68 capital punishment, Omaruru Case and, 155–57 Capriv, Leo von, 12 Cauer, Minna, 3, 40, 45, 48, 51, 91, 310–11 census data, 118n13 on children, 163 on German settler women, 58–59 mixed-race individuals, 110, 321 on white family status, 320 on white settler population, 101 Chailley-Bert, Joseph, 54n27 children census data on, 163 middle-class white concern for, 153, 156 Omaruru Case lessons and white children, 152–54 position of white, 162–63 protection of, 160–62 racial mixing and, 165–67 rumors of sexual cases involving, 157–59 citizenship laws, 165, 168–69, 242 dual citizenship, 273 class. See middle-class Germans; social class Cohen, Sam, 74 Colonial Aid Committee, 212 Colonial Charity Lottery, 66 colonialism. See also settler colonialism German Colonial Women’s League envisioning, 92 German women and, 21n17 Nazism connected to, 19n10 colonial woman question (koloniale Frauenfrage), 4 feminist and missionary counterproposals, 39–41 theoretical and practical approaches to, 36 Colonial Women’s Work, 249 Colonial Working Group (Koloniale Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft), 240 Colony and Home, 94, 96, 226 concubinage, 84n23 Conservative Party, 45 corporal punishment, 125 African women and, 141–42 ban of, for African women, 126, 131 German Colonial Women’s League on, 131–32

laws, 144n5 patriarchy and, 142 Council to Care for Returning ReichGermans, 229 Cramer, Ludwig German South West African Newspaper on, 136 legal case, 135–38 poisoning fears of, 136–38 racial violence of, 135–38 Daily Review, 35, 78 Damara, 12 Dernburg, Bernhard, 91, 164 Deutsche Freisinnige Volkspartei. See German Progressive People’s Party Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft. See German Colonial Society Deutsche Kolonial-Gesellschaft für SüdWest Afrika. See German Colonial Company for South West Africa Deutsche Kolonialschule. See German Colonial School Deutsche underm Kreuz des Südens (Uhde), 297 Deutsche Vaterlandspartei. See German Fatherland Party Deutsch-Kolonialer Frauenbund. See German Colonial Women’s League discrimination, against mixed race individuals, 104 domestic servants. See also maids alternatives to domestic service, 179 dormitories, unmarried white women. See also Homeland House funding, 111 German Colonial Women’s League building, 110–12 proposal for, 108–10 Dortmund Division IV, 294–95, 298 Dressel, Thekla, 188–89 dual citizenship, 273 DVP. See German People’s Party East Africa, 227–28 Eberhardt, George, 223 Eckenbrecher, Margarethe von, 127 education. See also schools von Falkenhausen, H., on, 181–82 German movement for women’s colonial, 181–85 Heyl on, 181–82

340 | index

Elisabeth House, 98–100, 160–61, 184 employer vetting system, 179–80 employment contracts, exploitative, 41–43 Engelmann, Liselotte, 261 Epp, Ritter von, 279 Erzberger, Matthias, 81 Estorff, Ludwig von, 62 eugenics, 6, 15 extremism, 89 Fabarius, Ernst Albert, 31, 33, 36, 53n11, 181 Falkenhausen, Fritz von, 62 Falkenhausen, Helen Nitze von, 62, 186 on education, 181–82 on German Colonial Women’s League, 180–81, 183–84, 187–91 German South West African Newspaper on, 185 Mecklenburg and, 184 Teaching Farm of, 182–83 fears, rumors confirming, 8 Federation of German Women’s Organizations (Frauenvereine), 29 feminism, 3–4, 32, 229–30 counter-proposals to colonial woman question and, 39–41 middle-class, 40–41, 91 socialist, 28 feminists, after World War I, 4–5 Fischer, Eugen, 173n39 Flottenverein (Navy League), 14 food rationing, in World War I, 222 France, laws on race in, 169 François, Curt von, 12 Frauenbund (Women’s League), 4, 9 Frauenbund Annual Report, 267n31 Frauenvereine (Federation of German Women’s Organizations), 29 Frauenverein vom Roten Kreuz für den Kolonien. See Women’s Red Cross Association for the Colonies Fräulein-Kamp, 219 Fricke, Hans, 282 Friedrich, 152–53, 155, 156 Frobenius, 231 on volk, 227–28 Fromm (officer), 176 Gad, Johannes, 129–30 gender. See also African women; German settler women; specific topics agricultural production and, 129–30

division of labor and, 127, 129 racial violence and, 5–7 genocide, structural, 5–7 German Association, 281–82 German Civil Code of 1900, 164 German Colonial Company for South West Africa (Deutsche Kolonial-Gesellschaft für Süd-West Afrika), 11 German Colonial Division, 9 German colonialism biopolitics of, in post-colonial era, 314–15 decline of, 239–40 empire, 10–14 moral character of, 31 race-based reproductive programs and, 2–3 German Colonial Newspaper, 126 German Colonial School (Deutsche Kolonialschule), 31 German Colonial Society (Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft), 4, 6, 9, 12–13, 31 barriers to success of, 65–67 Bebel attacking, 57–58, 67, 79–80 demographic impact of, 67–69 exploitative employment contracts, 41–43 German Colonial Women’s League relationship with, 90 German state cooperation with, 13–14 on German women’s settlement project, 247 impasse at, 79–80 propaganda of, 80–81 re-emigration inquiries collected by, 265n6 on respectability, 178–79 in selection process, 43–44 SPD and, 79–80 sponsorship by, 317, 318–19 women in, 4 in World War I, 213 German Colonial Women’s League (DeutschKolonialer Frauenbund), 88, 109 candidate selection by, 101–2 colonial vision of, 92 on corporal punishment, 131–32 dissolution of, 290–92 dormitory of, 110–12 on ethnic comrades, 226–27 von Falkenhausen, H., on, 180–81, 183–84, 187–91 formation of, 92–93 funding of, 237–38

index | 341

German Colonial Society relationship with, 90, 101–2 German South West African Newspaper on, 92–93 German women’s settlement project promoted by, 94–96 gossip about, 102, 116 on Homeland House, 193 Mecklenburg and, 95–96 middle-class women catered to by, 96 Nazism and, 299–303 NSDAP and, 277–87 in Omaruru, 280–81 securing of, 283–88 settlements sponsored by, 268n45 social class in, 176–77 Voigts and, 275–76 in Weimar era, 238–39, 258–60, 263–64 Women’s Colonial School and, 186 worldview clashes, 101–2 in World War I, 226–29 on Youth Home, 161–62 German Fatherland Party (Deutsche Vaterlandspartei), 22n28 German Federal Archives, 9 German People’s Party (DVP), 227 German Progressive People’s Party (Deutsche Freisinnige Volkspartei), 46 German Protectorate Forces, 12 German settler women, 5–7. See also specific topics alleged martyrdom of, 76–77 census data on, 58–59 domestic care by, 132 dormitory for unmarried white women, 108–12 fears of racial defilement of, 244–46 immorality of, 160, 175 Leutwein on ideal, 41 missionaries training, 32–33 respectability of, 177 war diaries, 59 welfare of, 58–59 as wives, 15, 31–32 German South West African Newspaper, 153 black peril scares perpetuated by, 150–51 on Cramer, 136 on Falkenhausen, H., 185 on German Colonial Women’s League, 92–93 racial awareness and, 103–4

on racial violence, 133 on World War I, 215–16 German South West African press, poisoning rumors in, 141–42 German South West Africa: Official Guide for Emigrants, 176 German women Busse on, 31–32 colonialism and, 21n17 in race war, 90–93 German Women’s Association for Nursing, 89, 90 German Women’s Bureau, 294–95 German women’s settlement project barriers to, 65–67 Bruck on, 34 budget of, 44–45, 81 von Bülow on, 34 criticisms of, 44–47 decline and rebirth of, 248–51 failure of, 198–99 in frontier zones, 69–70 funding of, 66, 69–70 German Colonial Society on, 247 German Colonial Society participation in, 33–36 German Colonial Women’s League promoting, 94–96 Hintrager on, 247 Leutwein on, 34–35, 40–41 marginalization of, 292–96 Mecklenburg on, 35–36, 66, 196–98 Nazism and, 296–303 origin of, 3–5, 29–33 propaganda for, 80–81 race war and, 311–12 reassessment of sponsorship of, 196–98 Reichstag debate on, 47–50 revival of, 246–48 selection process in, 43–44 as slavery, 44 sponsorship of, 322 state funding for, 251–54 in Weimar era, 258–60 welfare of women in, 258–60 Germany interracial marriage in, 165 as postcolonial power, 239 Gerstenhauer, M. R., 68–69 Gibeon, in Nama War, 75–76 Gibeon District Association, 104 Gleichschaltung, 276

342 | index

Gobabis District, poisoning rumors in, 138–40 Golinelli, Angelo, on interracial marriage, 15 Görgens, Hugo, 152, 154 Göring, Heinrich, 12 gossip, 7–10, 313–14. See also scandal defining, 7 about German Colonial Women’s League, 102, 116 about Homeland House, 191–92 as information source, 190 about maids, 175 rumor differentiated from, 20n14 in settler colonialism, 7 about sexual unions, 260 surrounding working-class women, 116 Voigts on, 260–61 in Weimar era, 260–63 of white settlers, 9–10 Great Depression, 252, 255, 296 Griqualand Bastaards, 16n2 Haase, Lena, 188 Hasenkamp, Hans, 104, 120n39, 156, 166 Hatten, 196 Hatten, Gertrud von, 132, 176 Haun, Anna, 211 Heimat-House. See Homeland House Herero, 11–12, 29, 69, 85n37 Herero War, 8, 9, 82, 115, 311 breakout of, 70–72 causes of, 59–60, 133 German conduct in, 72–73 labor shortage after, 128–29 Leutwein in, 73 postwar white reconstruction, 77–78 prisoners of war in, 134 property losses in, 77 SPD on, 71 Heyl, Hedwig, 111–12, 113–14, 176 background of, 121n61 on duties of women, 228–30 on education, 181–82 on reputation, 179 on Volk, 230 Hintrager, Oscar, 1, 2, 62–63, 121n51, 198, 251 on biracial birth rates, 105 on German women’s settlement project, 247 on maids, 96 on racial mixing, 106

Hitler, Adolf, 6, 271 Hitler Youth, Voigts on, 282–83 Hittcher, Emma, 74–76 Hoffman, Anna, 71 Hoffmann, Karl, 85n37 Hofmeyr, Gysber, 242 Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Ernst (Prince), 14 Hohenlohe-Schillingfürst, Chlodwig, 14 Holocaust, 6 Home Farm, 187, 188 Homeland House (Heimat-House), 111, 164, 188, 222 German Colonial Women’s League on, 193 gossip about, 191–92 operation of, 112–15 public scrutiny of, 191–94 recruits for, 113 scandal in, 194–96 Hülsmann (tavern keeper), 134 Immigrant Selection Board, 298–99 immorality, 156 of German settler women, 160, 175 of maids, 180–81 of working-class women, 176–77 Immorality Act of 1927, 244 International Red Cross, 211 International Women’s Day, 230 interracial marriage, 6–7, 23n32, 32, 51 bans on, 1, 2, 14, 96, 164–65 in Germany, 165 Golinelli on, 15 Lindequist on, 78–79 with Rehoboth Baster, 103 ruled as invalid, 164 Jiaozuo, 10–11 Joeden-Forgey, Elisa von, 19n9 Johann-Albrecht-Spende, 227, 232 Kannegießer, E., 194–96 Katzler, F. von, 280 Kaufmann, H. W., 214, 222 Keetmanshoop Newspaper, 94 Kenya, rape rumors in, 159 kindergartens, 161 Leutwein on, 162 Kirschenlohr, Luise, 223 Kladderadatsch, 50 Klammt, M., 39 Leutwein and, 54n34

index | 343

Klein Windhoek, 30 Knapp, Elfriede, 252 koloniale Frauenfrage. See colonial woman question Koloniale Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft. See Colonial Working Group Kolonial-Kriegerdankspende, 230 Kolonialschuldlüge (colonial guilt lie), 230 Konturu, 136 Kopper, Simon, 74 Korzfleisch, Ida von, 182 Kraus, Henny, 287 Krieß, Fritz, 65 Kuhn, Alexander, 89 Kuhn, Philaletes, 20n11, 91, 117n8 Külbel, Marie Zülchner, 72 labor gender and division of, 127, 129 postwar shortage, 128–29 land-grant programs, 243–44, 247 Lange, Edgar, 141 League of Nations, 8, 209, 242 Lehner, Grete, 287 Lehr, Ludwiga, 79, 90 Lehrfarm. See Teaching Farm Lettow-Vorbeck, Paul von, 208–9, 228, 232 Leutwein, Theodor, 12, 15, 43, 51, 69, 81, 91 on German women’s settlement project, 34–35, 40–41 in Herero War, 73 on ideal German settler women, 41 on kindergartens, 162 Klammt and, 54n34 on maids, 61–62 on racial mixing, 37–38 Liliencron, Adda von, 90–91, 96 on candidate selection, 102 Lindequist, Friedrich von, 36–37, 38, 54n31, 164, 185 on interracial marriage, 78–79 local women, as wives, 15 London Agreement, 242, 273, 278 Loßnitzer, Erich von, 288–89 Lüderitz, Adolph, 11 Lüderitzbucht Newspaper, 93, 101, 110, 155, 274–75 Lüderitzbucht Youth Home, 188 Ludwig, Erich, 103 Lutheran Rhenish Missionary Society, 11 Lützke, Anna, 261–62 lynching, 151, 155

Maherero, Samuel, 73, 223 maids, 9–10, 29. See also German settler women; working-class women deaths of, 64 first settlement of, 60–65 gossip about, 175 Hintrager on, 96 immorality of, 180–81 Leutwein on, 61–62 reputation of, 180 selection of, 178 wages of, 114–15 Maji Maji rebellion, 14, 88 marriage. See also specific topics Bebel on, 59, 63–64 maternalist-nationalism, 250–51 maternity, as imperialist cause, 97–101 Mecklenburg Schwerin, Herzog Johann Albert zu, 14, 22n28, 33, 41, 51, 54n26, 67, 79, 186, 240 death of, 231 Falkenhausen, H., and, 184 German Colonial Women’s League and, 95–96 on German women’s settlement project, 35–36, 66, 196–98 middle-class Germans concern for children of, 153, 156 in South West Africa, 101 women as housekeepers, 101 middle-class women feminism, 40–41, 91 German Colonial Women’s League catering to, 96 nationalism of, 13 newspapers of, 47–48 in South West Africa, 91–92, 176 women’s movement, 29 Mischehenfrage (race-mixing question), 2 Mischlinge, 165–67 missionaries counter-proposals to colonial woman question and, 39–41 German settler women trained by, 32–33 mixed race individuals, 1, 14. See also interracial marriage; racial mixing as danger, 28–29 discrimination against, 104 Hintrager on biracial birth rates, 105 NSDAP and, 287–88 stereotypes of, 245 mixed-race individuals, census data, 110

344 | index

morality, in German colonialism, 31 Morgenstern, Marie, 262–63 Müller, Hermann, 46 Müller, Peter, 225 Munich Free Press, 45 Nama, 11–12, 69 labor shortage after, 128–29 postwar white reconstruction, 77–78 Nama War, 8, 9, 82, 115, 311 causes of, 59–60, 133 Gibeon in, 75–76 outbreak of, 73–76 Witbooi in, 74 National Archives of Namibia, 9 Nationaler Frauendienst (NFD), 209–10, 213 nationalism of middle-class Germans, 13 in Weimar era, 251 in Wilhelmine era, 35 National Liberal Party, 14 National Socialist Party (NSDAP), 240, 254, 315 banning of, 288–90 biracial people and, 287–88 German Colonial Women’s League and, 278–79 political activism of, 277–79 private assistance from, 279–80 in South West Africa, 274–75 Voigts in, 271–72, 275–76 National-Socialist Womanhood, 286–87, 289, 293–94 Native Commission, 154 Navy League (Flottenverein), 14, 22n8, 35 Nazi Party. See National Socialist Party Nazism, 2, 165, 169, 271 apartheid and, 303 colonialism connected to, 19n10 German Colonial Women’s League and, 299–303 German women’s settlement project and, 296–303 ideology of, on racial mixing, 173n39 racism and, 272 in schools, 278–79, 284–85 newspapers. See also specific topics middle-class, 47–48 poisoning rumors in, 141–42 in South West Africa, 93–94 in World War I, 215

NFD. See Nationaler Frauendienst NSDAP. See National Socialist Party Nuremburg Laws, 165, 168 nurses, 33, 36, 89, 116n1, 217, 219, 268, 303 Ohlsen, Elisabeth, 138 Omaruru Case, 148–49, 170 as black peril scare, 159–60 capital punishment and, 155–57 factual basis for, 151–52 initial reports of, 150–52 as object lesson for white parents, 152–54 rumors, 154–55 sentencing in, 154–56 white children and, 152–54 On the Native Problem in German Southwest Africa. A Call to Germany’s Women (Kuhn), 89 Ovambo, 11–12 Pan German League, 163 Pan German Society (Alldeutscher Verband), 13 patriarchy corporal punishment and, 142 violence and, 126 Patriotic Women’s Society (Vaterländische Frauenverein), 33 patriotism, 212–13 peasant women. See maids; working-class women Peters, Carl, 29–30 Pierard, Richard V., 17n3 pogroms, 155 poisoning rumors, 143–44 Cramer and, 136–38 in Gobabis District, 138–40 spreading, 140–41 Population Registration Act of 1950, 303 post-colonial era, biopolitics of colonialism in, 314–15 postwar labor shortage, 128–29 prisoner colonial transportation proposal Arenberg on, 30 opposition to, 30–31 prisoners of war, from Herero War, 134 Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949, 303 pronatalism, 98, 310 prostitution, 107, 110, 179

index | 345

race-based reproductive programs, 6–7 German colonialism and, 2–3 race-mixing question (Mischehenfrage), 2 race war, 98 German women in, 90–93 settlement policies and, 311–12 racial awareness, 167 German South West African Newspaper and, 103–4 racial mixing. See also interracial marriage Arenberg on, 27–28 children and, 165–67 German citizenship and, 165 Hintrager on, 106 Leutwein on, 37–38 Nazi ideology on, 173n39 Schmidt, K., on, 106–7 schools and, 164–66 South West African views on, in 1800s, 27–28 racial violence towards African women, 132–35 of Cramer, 135–38 gendered, 5–7 German South West African Newspaper on, 133 historiography on, 125–26 patriarchy and, 126 racism Nazism and, 272 before World War I, 155–56 Raggy’s Fahrt nach Südwest (Haase), 188 Rall, Fritz, 140 rape rumors, 142, 170n2. See also black peril scares in Kenya, 159 Rehoboth Basters, 1, 16n2, 158 intermarriage with, 103 legal reich status of, 14–15 Seitz on, 224 Rehoboth uprising, 223–26 Reich Colonial League (Reichs KolonialBund), 9, 10, 276, 293, 295, 315 Reichstag Budget Commission, 81 debate of 1899, 27–28 reputation employer vetting system, 179–80 Heyl on, 179 of maids, 180 of working-class women, 179–80

respectability, 176–80 European standards for, 177 German Colonial Society on, 178–79 of German settler women, 177 Rhineland Horror, 21n17, 173n39, 244–46, 314 Richthofen, Irmgard von, 111 Rohrbach, Paul, 68, 165 Rosenberg, Hans, 278 rumors, 7–10. See also black peril scares development of, 7 fears confirmed by, 8 gossip differentiated from, 20n14 Omaruru Case, 154–55 poisoning, 136–41, 143–44 of poisoning in German press, 138–40 of poisoning in Gobabis District, 138–40 rape, 142, 159, 170n2 of sexual cases involving children, 157–59 spread of rumors of poisoning, 140–41 during World War I, 215–16 Rust, Conrad, 72, 151 black peril scares perpetuated by, 148–49 Sauter, Julie, 210 scandal defining, 175 in Homeland House, 194–96 Schenk, Fritz Johann, 287 Schmidt, Anna, 65 Schmidt, Karl, 103 on racial mixing, 106–7 Schnee, Heinrich, 245 Scholz-Klink, Gertrud, 289, 299 Schön, Frida, 64 schools. See also kindergartens fees of, 163 Nazism in, 278–79, 284–85 racial mixing and, 164–66 segregation of, 166–68, 170 Voigts on, 284–85, 301–2 Schreiber, August, 30 Schuckmann, Bruno von, 109 Schulze, August, 246, 248 Schumacher, Ruth, 252 Schutzgebiet (protectorate), 10 Schutztruppe (protectorate forces), 12 segregation, 150 expansion of, 8 renewed calls for, 166–68 of schools, 166–68, 170

346 | index

Seitz, Theodor, 154, 156, 165–66, 179, 191, 199, 231–32, 240 on Rehoboth Basters, 224 Women’s Colonial School supported by, 185 during World War I, 217–18 servant women. See maids Settlement Company for German South West Africa (Siedlungsgesellschaft für Deutsch-Südwest Afrika), 12–13, 30 settlements, first German servant women’s, 60–65 settler colonialism, 6 Busse on, 31–32 gossip in, 7 sexual contact and sexual unions gossip about, 260 of white men with African women, 105–8, 244 of working-class women, 180 sexuality of African women, 142–43 colonial scares about, 175 Shark Island Camp, 99 shipboard zone, 119n35 Siedlungsgesellschaft für Deutsch-Südwest Afrika, 30. See Settlement Company for German South West Africa Sindemaaß, 140–41 social class. See also middle-class Germans; working-class women in German Colonial Women’s League, 176–77 reputation and, 176–80 socialist feminism, 28 socialist movement, 10 Sonnenberg, Else, 71–72 South Africa apartheid and segregation expansion in, 8 South West Africa invasion, 208 South African National Party, 303, 304 Southwest, 93, 178, 218 South West Africa. See also specific topics African population of, 243 invasion of, by South Africa, 208 middle-class Germans in, 91–92, 101, 176 NSDAP in, 274 racial awareness in, 103–5 racial order in, at turn of century, 14–16 views on racial mixing in, 27–28 working-class women in, 111, 162, 176–77 in World War I, 214–32

South West Africa Constitution Act, 242 South West African Barmer Missionsgesellschaft. See Barmen Missionary Society South West African Legislative Assembly, 272 South West African Mandate, 241–44 Southwest Herald, 93, 177 SPD, 14, 28, 40, 57–58 German Colonial Society and, 79–80 on Herero War, 71 sponsored migrants, 262–63 Sprandel, Charlotte, 188–91, 201n40 Stauch, August, 251–52 Steinmeister, Nora von, 278 stereotypes, racial, 171n5 of biracial people, 245 Stresemann, Gustav, 240 Stübel, Oscar Wilhelm, 67–68, 87n60 Swakopmund, 61 Swakopmund Newspaper, 93 syphilis, 107, 158 Tausendfreund, Anna, 72, 85n37 Teaching Farm (Lehrfarm), of Falkenhausen, H., 182–83 Thomas, Gustav, 184 trafficking, 44, 56n52 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 31 Trotha, Lothar von, 73 Uhde, Sophia von, 297 U.L.K., 47 Vaterländische Frauenverein (Patriotic Women’s Society), 33 Verenigde Nasionale Suidwes Party, 273 Verkafferung, 37 Versailles Treaty, 231 vice agents, 179 Vietsch, Wilhelm von, 157–58 vigilantism, 7, 155 violence, 7–10 police-sanctioned, 7 Voigts, Frida, 239, 252, 255, 257, 268n43, 278–79, 296–97, 300 von Boemcken, A., and, 286–87, 291 German Colonial Women’s League and, 275–76 on gossip, 260–61 on Hitler Youth, 282–83 in key political conflicts, 281–83

index | 347

in NSDAP, 271–72, 275–76 on schools, 284–85, 301–2 Volk Frobenius on, 227–28 Heyl on, 230 Völkstum, 263 Vorwärts, 71 Wallberg, Gertrud, 282, 283 Wandke, Ernst, 279, 281 weddings, colonial, 62 Weigel, Heinrich, 273, 285, 287–88 Weimar era, 2, 16, 296 early, 239–40 German Colonial Women’s League in, 238–39, 258–60, 263–64 German women’s settlement project in, 258–60 gossip in, 260–63 nationalism in, 251 Weimar Treaty, 237 werfts, 129–30 white men, sexual contact with African women, 105–8, 244 white pronatalism, 2 white settlers fears of, 7–8 gossip of, 9–10 Wiegel, Heinrich, 283–84 Wiehager, Paul, 133, 135 Wilhelm II (Kaiser), 14, 28 Wilhelmine era, 2, 17n3, 90, 168, 310–11 nationalism in, 35 Willich, Cissy, 218, 222, 224–25 Windhoek Advertiser, 93 Windhoek Newspaper, 93, 103 Windhoek Women’s Organization, 248 Winkler, Friedrich, 190, 194–96 Winter, Marie, 64 Witbooi, Hendrick, 12 in Nama War, 74 Witbooi Nama, 11–12 Witteman, Margaret, 301 Woermann Shipping Line, 13 Women and Socialism (Bebel), 57–58 The Women in the Colonies, 293, 295

Women’s Association for Nursing in the Colonies, 41 women’s colonial education doubts and rivalry in, 185–87 German movement for, 181–85 Women’s Colonial School, 182, 249, 255, 270n70, 291–92 German Colonial Women’s League and, 186 Seitz support for, 185–86 Women’s League (Frauenbund), 4, 9 Women’s League of the German Colonial Society, 94 women’s question, 4 Women’s Red Cross Association for the Colonies (Frauenverein vom Roten Kreuz für den Kolonien), 95, 118n26 working-class women, 47, 57–58 gossip surrounding, 116 immorality of, 176–77 reputation of, 179–80 sexual unions of, 180 in South West Africa, 111, 162, 176–77 World War I, 9, 10 charitable efforts in, 217 feminists after, 4–5 first salvos in, 218–19 food rationing in, 222 German Colonial Society in, 213 German Colonial Women’s League in, 226–29 German South West African Newspaper on, 215–16 loss contact between mainland and colonies in, 210–14 newspapers in, 215 outbreak of, 207–8 racism before, 155–56 refugees, 220–21 rumors during, 215–16 Seitz during, 217–18 South West Africa in, 214–32 World War II, 10 Youth Home, 161–62 youth organizations, 282–83