Those Germans....

I know, I know, the other Europeans were not good either. There is even a nice sentence at the bottom of the quote about the Americans and the native Indians.

But the fact remains that the Germans were pretty good at being bad.

So, here it is, joining the author of this article, Norimitsu Onishi, in trying to give some peace to those murdered souls:

Germany is in negotiations to acknowledge the genocide of Namibia a century ago. "The Germans came and wanted to settle on our land. When the Hereros refused, we were killed. The Germans shot the Hereros, or sealed their water wells and let them perish in the desert." As many as 80% (some 80,000) of all Hereros are believed to have died while Namibia was under colonial rule.

Namibia was Germany’s most prized African colony, the one that attracted thousands of German settlers, who grabbed land and cattle from local residents.


During German rule in Namibia, called South-West Africa back then, colonial officers studying eugenics developed ideas on racial purity, and their forces tried to exterminate two rebellious ethnic groups, the Herero and Nama, some of them in concentration camps. The events in Namibia between 1904 and 1908 foreshadowed Nazi ideology and the Holocaust. Yet the genocide in this former colony remains little known in Germany, the rest of Africa and, to some extent, even in Namibia itself.


About 80 percent of all Herero, who numbered as many as 100,000, are believed to have eventually died. Many perished after the battle of Waterberg: They were shot, hanged from trees or died in the desert, where the Germans sealed off watering holes and also prevented survivors from returning.


After Germany lost its African colonies during World War I, Namibia slipped under the control of South Africa’s white-minority government until 1990, largely making talk of the genocide taboo. After independence, Namibia’s liberation party — South West Africa People’s Organization, or Swapo — took over and governs to this day. But it is dominated by the country’s main ethnic group, the Ovambo, and critics contend that it showed little interest in bringing up the genocide against the Herero and Nama.

In a potential obstacle to the talks, some Nama and Herero leaders want to negotiate directly with Germany for compensation. The Namibian government, they say, will spread future money from the Germans to unaffected ethnic groups or, worse, simply pocket it.

While Germany has directly paid victims of World War II in the past, compensating descendants in Namibia would subject Germany and other nations to an endless stream of new claims, Mr. Polenz [the German special envoy] said. “Maybe even the United States would ask us now what to do with the Indians?” he said.