Concentration camps and pseudoscientific experiments were used by German officials to torture and kill.
The claims of "white genocide" by Trump, Apartheid Elon, and others on the far right are laughable. It's a classic case of victimizers claiming to be victims.
The colonial powers in Africa, to differing degrees, engaged in plenty of genocide which is still being documented.
Though Germany's stint as a colonial power was relatively short, it was particularly brutal.
Dubbed "Germany's forgotten genocide", and described by historians as the first genocide of the 20th Century, the systematic murder of more than 70,000 Africans is being marked with a national day of remembrance for the first time in Namibia. Almost 40 years before their use in the Holocaust, concentration camps and pseudoscientific experiments were used by German officials to torture and kill people in what was then called South West Africa. The victims, primarily from the Ovaherero and Nama communities, were targeted because they refused to let the colonisers take their land and cattle. [ ... ] "This extermination order indicated that they were no longer going to take on any prisoners - women, men, anyone with or without cattle - they were going to be executed," Namibian historian Martha Akawa-Shikufa told the national broadcaster NBC. This was followed by the introduction of concentration camps, she added. "People got worked to death, a lot of people died in the concentration camps because of exhaustion. In fact there were pre-printed death certificates [saying] 'death by exhaustion', waiting for those people to die, because they knew they would die." The remains of some of those who were killed were then shipped to Germany for now-discredited research to prove the racial superiority of white Europeans. Many of the bones have now been repatriated.
As bad as the Namibia genocide was, the worst perpetrator was Belgium – in particular King Leopold II of Belgium. King Leopold was a precursor of Hitler and Stalin, and that is not hyperbole. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness was inspired by the atrocities in what used to be called the Congo Free State.
The 1998 best selling book King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa tells the story of one of the biggest atrocities in human history.
