Colonialism continued. Versailles and the end of formal German colonial rule

Although the newly elected parliament had voted overwhelmingly in favour of preserving colonial possessions on March 1^st, 1919, the Allies quickly agreed that Germany should no longer be allowed to have colonies, for it was (unlike them) incapable of “civilising” and “ruling” colonial peoples. The 1918 Blue Book was one of the documents that served to prove this argument: British and South African officials had collected material on the German occupation and rule of Namibia, including statements from Herero and Nama on the violent atrocities against their peoples from 1904 to 1907. However, the “end of German colonial rule did not put an end to colonialism”, historian Sebastian Conrad argues in German Colonialism. A Short History. This holds true both for the former German colonies as well as for the perception of colonialism within German society.

Despite the promise of self-determination Woodrow Wilson made in his Fourteen Points, despite his demand of an “impartial adjustment of all colonial claims” in which the “interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight”, neither the former German territories nor any colonial territory was granted the right of self-determination in 1919. The fact that the Allies argued that Germany was unfit for colonial rule only fuelled opposition against the so-called Kolonialschuldlüge (colonial guilt lie, in analogy to the Kriegsschuldlüge) that was shared by nearly all political parties. As a result, colonialism became more popular in Germany than ever before. The German government actively supported resettling in the colonies.

Mandates of the League of Nations

Both Britain and France were eager to incorporate the German territories into their respective colonial empires. They met with rather fierce opposition from the American president who was opposed to imperialism in general. Wilson wanted to place the colonies under the supervision of the League of Nations and thus to initiate a change in colonial politics. Unlike Wilson, the South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts, one of the most important strategists of the British Empire, recognised in the League of Nations a possibility to continue the imperial policy of the past. On his initiative, the mandates were divided into categories corresponding to the “level of development” of the respective territories. Britain, France and Belgium were to become mandatory powers of the African territories on behalf of the League of Nations. In their response to the terms of peace, German diplomats demanded that Germany also become a mandatory power but these claims were denied by the Great Four. Smut’s assessment of the mandatory system shows that he wanted to ensure the continued subordination of the African colonies in particular.

According to Smuts, the German colonies both in Africa and in the Pacific were “inhabited by barbarians who would not only be unable to govern themselves, but who would also have no possibility of self-determination”. From his point of view this was especially true for German South West Africa, which South Africa wanted to annex. On paper, the peace treaties marked the change from colonial rule to trusteeship.

There were three classes of mandates, A, B and C. Class A included all former Ottoman territories in the Middle East which had already been divided between France and Great Britain in the Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 16th 1916. These territories were supposed to govern themselves, but were also to receive what was described in rather nebulous words as administrative assistance. Class B contained Togoland, Cameroon and Tanganyika, Burundi and Rwanda. These were to be administered by their mandatories. The Pacific islands and Namibia were left for Class C. They were defined as incapable of self-government, which played into the hands of Smuts and his government. As a League of Nations mandatory power, South Africa de facto annexed Namibia to its national territory; it was not until 1990 that this former German colony became an independent state – thus also ending the apartheid regime at the same time.

The changes regarding colonial rule were more ideal than concrete. On the one hand, colonial rule was defined as limited in time, even if deadlines for parts of the territories were far away. On the other hand, colonial rule now had to be justified differently, because Article 22 of the League of Nations Statute stated “that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilisation and that securities for the performance of this trust should be embodied in this Covenant”. Thus, it was now the task of the former colonial masters, who had mutated into mandate holders, to take care of the welfare and development of the indigenous population. They had to report regularly to the mandate commission of the League of Nations.

Residents of the mandated territories could also send petitions and complaints about grievances to this committee. France and Great Britain responded to this new requirement by forging plans for the economic development of the colonies and by considering energy production, the expansion of transport infrastructure and the reduction and refinement of resources. They now had a contractual responsibility by which to be measured. Nevertheless, the commission had little opportunity to influence the actual government of the mandated areas. When revolts broke out in present-day Namibia in 1922, which were violently crushed by South Africa, neither the Mandate Commission nor the League of Nations Council could even make South Africa admit that it had made mistakes in dealing with the rebellion. Instead, the government representative of South Africa announced that the indigenous population had to be inoculated with “respect for white superiority”.

Although the Paris Peace Conference did not succeed in putting the global right of self-determination of peoples on the agenda of world politics, the topic was now a point of reference for the colonised world. The struggle for colonial independence was to become the signature of the coming decades. After 1919, the anti-colonial movement began to network internationally. It appeared as an actor in international politics and articulated demands. Not only the German, but any colonial rule was the subject of international negotiations, as was the question of how the colonies could be prepared for self-government. At the women’s peace conference in Zürich pacifist activists demanded that the League of Nations should extend the mandate system to all colonial territories. In 1919, however, the colonies were still a long way from their political independence.

Colonial revisionism in Germany

As a result of the Treaty of Versailles, German settlers were dispossessed and had to leave the territories. Only South Africa allowed half of the German population to stay in Namibia. Four million Germans signed up for a campaign against the loss of the colonies which was initiated, among others, by the German Colonial Society. In order to counter the impact of the atrocities documented in the Blue Book, the German diplomats in Versailles tried to spread the myth of a benevolent German colonialism, centred around the figure of the loyal “Askari”, as all African Colonial soldiers who had fought in the German army were called after 1919. The alleged loyalty of the Askari was used in colonial revisionist propaganda as proof that Germany was indeed a capable colonial power. Germany’s official response to the conditions of peace claimed that German colonial rule had brought “peace and order … The development of the country by roads and railways for international traffic and its trade and the promotion of existing and the introduction of new cultures has given the natives a higher mission.”

The colonial lobbyists spun a fairy tale of German colonialism as a “school of the nation” for young adventurers, who also incidentally civilised the “undeveloped races”. Although this narrative had nothing in common with reality, the colonial revisionists, according to historian Dirk van Laak, successfully told it again and again. They founded new associations, which joined together in 1922 as the Koloniale Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft. The German Colonial Society alone, led by former governors, had 30,000 members, among its vice presidents was Konrad Adenauer, the mayor of Cologne and future chancellor of West Germany. In order to underpin the German claim to colonies and to keep this idea alive in the public, the society distributed extensive colonial propaganda. Exhibitions and slide shows, rallies and conferences were organised, a youth organisation was established, and memories and aspirations became visible in monuments. The subject also found its way into popular culture with the new medium of film, as well as through memoirs and adventure novels such as Lettow-Vorbeck’s bestseller Heia Safari and Hans Grimm’s Volk ohne Raum (People without Space), whose title was adopted by the National Socialists as the slogan of their violent claims to expansion. The German colonial movement reached its peak only after Germany was no longer an official colonial power.

Although there was a close connection between ultra-nationalists and colonial revisionists – Lettow-Vorbeck was one of the protagonists of the counterrevolutionary Kapp Putsch in 1920 – all parties except the communists supported the colonial claims. The ministry for reconstruction and later the foreign ministry ran colonial departments, in which many former colonial officials worked. The ties between the ministry officials and the colonial revisionist movement were strong. Especially under Chancellor Gustav Stresemann, colonial propaganda was massively supported by the foreign ministry.

Colonialism’s long shadow

Dirk van Laak stresses that German imperialism indirectly continued to exist through investments by private companies, the promotion of infrastructure and a foreign cultural policy that advertised Germanism abroad. Also, the colonial women’s schools were still in operation until 1945 as in the case of Rendsburg were first founded in 1926. They trained women to be sent to the colonies and were thus also an instrument of indirect German imperialism. In addition, the former German plantations were bought back and generously supported by the ministry of finance from the mid-1920s onwards. Between 1914 and 1930 the German population in Namibia thus doubled to a total of 30,000. Another 4,000 Germans had relocated to the Cameroons, Tanganyika and New Guinea.

However, there were also shifts in perception and hierarchies. In her book on the German plantations in British Cameroon during the interwar period, Carolin Authaler explains that German colonial rule was reassessed in the course of this private-sector colonialisation. Since the mandate administration could still fall back on forced labour, the German plantation owners paid comparatively better wages and thus made work on these plantations more attractive. At the same time, workers now resisted the violence of white plantation owners by complaining to the official British authorities thus improving their work situation and at the same time unsettling “the power of the white plantation managers and the racist hierarchies on the plantations”. Workers from French Cameroon, where forced labour was the order of the day (it was not until 1946 that it was officially abolished in the French Empire), on the other hand, migrated to the British part to work on German plantations. This again reshaped the narrative of German colonial rule in the Cameroons as the least bad power of the three in charge.

Despite the strong revisionism movement, there was also criticism of colonialism in Germany, from pacifists like Hans Paasche, but also from people from the colonies who built up the anti-colonial movement from their European places of exile. In the 1920s, Berlin became a hub of this activism which often intermingled with communist demands.

Neither colonialism nor German colonial history ended in 1919. The long shadow of colonial practices of violence reached as far as West German development aid in the 1960s, as Hubertus Büschel proves in his study Hilfe zur Selbsthilfe. Historians should take a cue from Ulrike Schaper and aspire not so much to write a German colonial history (and the story of its end) than to look at German history in a post-colonial way. As public debate about the Berlin Humboldt Forum shows, questioning the colonial order within the topics we address has at long last become a matter of first-rate importance for Germans taking account of their past, present and future.

Birte Förster is a German historian and author of the book 1919. Ein Kontinent erfindet sich neu (1919 A Continent Reinvents Itself). She is currently researching psychiatric treatment practices in West Germany and Italy from 1950 to 1980 at the Institute for the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine of the Berlin Charité and the Humboldt University Berlin.

German colonialsim, Weimar Republic