I GIVE THANKS ras jon, for forwarding this line of reasoning. iani wife is from namibia-and there are many truths yet to be revelaed:

check this:
The roots of Nazism in German colonialism in Africa--MN

Namibians seek reparations for a brutal chapter

http://www.phillynews.com/inquirer/98/Apr/03/international/NAMI03.htm

By Neely Tucker KNIGHT RIDDER NEWS SERVICE

WATERBERG, Namibia -- Camped on this burning plateau of rock and sand at the dawn of the century, a German general wrote out a still-reverberating declaration that many scholars say sowed the seeds of the Holocaust.

On Oct. 2, 1904, after putting down an uprising by the Herero ethnic group in what was then the German colony of South West Africa, Lt. Gen. Lothar Von Trotha delivered a Vernichtungsbefehl, or extermination order. It read, in part:

"Every Herero found within German borders, with or without guns, with or without livestock, will be shot. I will not give shelter to any Herero women or children. They must either return to their people or be shot at."

During the next three years, Hereros died in a wasteland so waterless that the living slit open the bellies of the dead to drink liquid from their stomachs. Men were killed. Emaciated men, women and children were worked to death.

By 1907, an estimated three out of every four Herero men, women and children were dead. Only about 15,000, out of a prewar population of 75,000, were still alive.

Later, a German scholar wrote a book about the Hereros that many historians say was the basis for Adolf Hitler's fatal theories on race.

Now, the Herero living in what is now Namibia demand that Germany begin negotiation compensation for the descendants of the survivors of Von Trotha's final solution.

"The Germans repay the Jews because they're white," says Mberumba Kerina, a retired Namibian diplomat, and a Herero. "They pat us on the head because we're black and African, and don't think we count so very much."

German descendants, who compose 7 percent of modern Namibia, are outraged by such comments. They insist there was no genocide, only a hard-fought military battle. Other ethnic groups say the Herero are trying to turn old wounds into fresh cash.

German officials met with the Herero delegation and told them Germany "very much regretted" the incident, according to a German diplomat at the talks: "But that is not an apology, and it most certainly does not mean we will pay something that might be called reparations."

Stumbling across an absolute truth in a history so bitter and so long buried is difficult. What can be ascertained is this:

When German settlers colonized the region in 1884, the Herero were their allies. They wanted German help against their traditional enemies, the Nama people.

But the alliance fell apart as the 5,000 German settlers brutally dominated the Africans. Herero men were forced to work for white farmers. German men raped Herero women, but were not punished. Cattle -- the Herero's sacred icon and symbol of wealth -- often were confiscated.

In January 1904, Herero chief Samuel Maherero led his warriors in a surprise attack on German soldiers and farmers, killing more than 150. From Europe, Germany dispatched thousands of soldiers.

The new troops quickly turned the war around, and Maherero made a critical blunder.

He summoned all of his soldiers -- who always traveled with their women, children and cattle -- to Waterberg. The move isolated about 25,000 Herero in a sandy valley 15 miles wide. Steep bluffs rose on three sides. To the open side lay a 200-mile-wide waterless oven of rock and sand called the Omaheke sandveld, or desert plateau.

Von Trotha rushed to this military dead-end with 1,600 heavily armed soldiers. Using the steep bluffs as boundary walls, he attacked from three sides. He left the sandveld open as an escape route.

The plan worked.

Defeated, the Herero stampeded into the plateau. It is a region where sand burns underfoot, where the sun burns everything above it, where gnats and fleas swarm ears and eyes, where water is a mirage.

And here, historians say, legitimate battle turned to genocide.

Von Trotha poisoned the few wells in the region. He erected a 150-mile line of guard posts, locking the Herero into the desert.

On Oct. 2, 1904 -- two months into this death-by-thirst campaign -- he delivered his extermination order. In the long and sad history of colonialism, it remains one of the most notorious documents of the era. British historian Thomas Pakenham writes it has "few parallels in modern European history, outside the span of the Third Reich."

The Herero died in the tens of thousands. Oral histories say men slit the throats of cattle to drink blood. They suckled the breasts of new mothers.

Women and children who tried to surrender were turned back into the desert. Von Trotha reasoned that his own troops were in danger of starvation and there was no margin for error.

"To accept women and children, most of whom are seriously ill, is a serious danger to the troops, and to feed them an impossibility. I find it most appropriate that the nation perishes instead of infecting our soldiers," he wrote in his diary.

Herero from around the region were rounded up and taken to concentration camps, where they starved and died of disease over the next three years. Perhaps 15,000 lived through it all.

During the onslaught, Eugen Fischer, a prominent German scientist, came to the region. He studied the offspring of German men and African women. He found the children to be mentally and physically inferior to German children.

He wrote a book about it, The Principals of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene. Hitler, while writing Mein Kampf years later, read the book.

By the time the Third Reich came to power, Fischer was chancellor at the University of Berlin. He taught many Nazi physicians their first course in medicine. One of his noted pupils was Josef Mengele, the infamous doctor at Auschwitz who used Jewish children for genetic experiments.

In the opinion of most scholars, Fischer's books and subsequent career are clear influences on Hitler's theories of the "purity" of the Aryan race. This mythical standard, of course, was the basis of the Holocaust, in which some six million Jews were killed.

"This scientific racism is one of the most important connections between the Herero, the first genocide of the 20th century, and the Holocaust, and too little attention is paid to it," says Frank Chalk, historian at Concordia University in Montreal and vice president of the international Association of Genocide Scholars.

Indeed, the slaughter quickly faded from common memory. German rule ended in 1915, in the wake of World War I. South Africans took over, and Namibian people had new colonial settlers to battle. Those struggles continued until full independence in 1990.

With freedom, old grievances re-emerged.

When German Chancellor Helmut Kohl came to Namibia in 1995, Kuaima Riruako, the Herero Paramount Chief, demanded a meeting and a formal apology. Kohl's staff refused, allowing Riruako only a few minutes with Kohl at a reception.

"This was an insult to me . . . and shows a lack of basic understanding that our vital and important concerns are to be mixed with wine and beer bottles at noisy cocktail parties," Riruako lectured reporters.

But the chief's outburst backfired.

It angered conservative Germans, dismayed liberals, and turned outside observers toward a more pragmatic reality. Germany, after all, has sent more than $410 million in direct aid to Namibia since independence, far more than any other nation.

"Germany has already tacitly acknowledged that their colonial adventure here was a bad idea and they are generous with aid to Namibia," said one Western diplomat. "The Hereros are insane if they think there's any more water in that well."

The issue makes Wilhelm Hoff, 74, a German farmer so angry that he pounds on a restaurant table, causing a public commotion.

"Reparations? Sexual slavery?" Hoff shouts. "Where does one draw the line? Who is to pay whom, and for what? Everyone had been killing everyone else here before the Germans arrived. The Hereros are trying to take advantage of the German government, trying to shame them -- when they ought to be ashamed themselves."

Adelheid Tjijorokisa-Ndjavera, a wealthy Herero woman with two German grandfathers, is just as angry.

"There are days I think we're the Uncle Toms of the world," she says. "We've let everyone have everything, particularly the Germans. I don't think the German perception of foreigners has changed since the Middle Ages."

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.

Be PART of the solution -- People Against Racist Terror/ PO Box 1055/Culver City CA 90232-1055/310-288-5003/ Order our journal "Turning the Tide." mnovickttt@igc.org

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