Was There Cruelty In German

Colonies?

A Handbook of 1919, and Something About One-Eyed Propaganda

NOW that the European international crisis is over, the next subject of argument with Germany probably will be the question of returning the former Ger man colonies.

This matter has been discussed in the “P.1.M.”; and we have expressed the opinion that completely good friendship between. Britain and Germany is not possible while the great Germanic nation is without colonies. We also have praised the ability in colonial administration dis played by Germany prior to 1914. In re ply, we have received, from a valued cor respondent, the following:— IAM disturbed when I read that you are rather inclined to favour the re turn of some of Germany’s colonies. I have a book here before me, “Treatment of Natives in the German Colonies”, pre pared under the direction of the His torical Section of the Foreign Office. The information it contains was compiled by trained writers, and it (with others) was prepared for the Peace Conference (1919) to provide British delegates with infor mation in the most convenient form re specting the different countries they had to consider. G. W. Prothero is the General Editor and formerly Director of the Historical Section. This handbook deals with the official element, Adminis tration of Justice, Flogging. Forced Labour, and Brutalities in South West Africa, and the different Risings and Re bellions. It is very damning indeed.

It appears that the actual administra tion of justice was in a state of chaos.

Each official was a law unto himself.

Power was given to and exercised by minor officials, almost without appeal to the higher authorities, who failed to exercise any effective supervision over the proceedings of their subordinates. And in every official scandal that was revealed, secret influences screened the offenders to prevent publicity.

Father Schmitz, a missionary, and his associates in Togoland, who exposed some of the atrocities and immoralities of an officer named Schmidt, were directly threatened by Dernberg in the Reichstag.

The Secretary of State said that he had written to the Chapter of Cologne Cathe dral complaining of the charges brought by their missionaries against officials, and intimating that if what he termed “the unfounded charges” did not cease, he would feel compelled to resort to ad ministrative measures against the mis sions. “This campaign against officials must cease, else it would be impossible to get anyone to enter the Colonial Service”. (Dernberg, Reichstag, December 3rd, 1906.) In the administration of the German colonies the system of flogging was the chief instrument of .oppression. The facts in connection with this system were so notorious and so generally known in other colonies that German African colonies were freely spoken of as the “Colonies of the Twenty-five” (i.e., where 25 lashes were the usual punishment), and the “Flogging Colonies”.

I read in “The Times” recently that courses in colonial practice will open in

October at the Reich Institute for Colonial Administration, which is now being set up. “When (it is stated) the day of justice breaks, a trained corps of colonial administrators will thus await the order of the Puhrer”.

Teachings at the Institute will seek to combine the lessons drawn from pre-war colonial experience with the newer ideas of the National-Socialist Reich. Par ticular attention will be paid to the ap plication of the Nazi racial theory in the colonies, which implies a rigid separation of natives and Europeans.

In a book on the German Colonial Em pire, edited by Hans Meyer in 1910, re ference is made to South-west Africa’s policy, and it is stated that colonists could not consider the inhabitants; they were allowed to live as long as they did not interfere with the development of progress, but should they do so, then they were shot down like wild animals.

“Wo sie diese Forderung aber nicht erfullten, hat man sie wie Raubwild abgeschossen”.

I feel that if we give way to the Ger mans, as we are doing, they will not only want their former colonies returned to them, but will demand ours as well.

Any people who could ill-treat natives as the Germans did in South-west Africa, when they exterminated over 75,000 in the Majimaji Rebellion by their ferocity, are not fit to handle primitive and sub ject people. In the Herero Rebellion in 1904, General von Trotha, “issued his pro clamation of October 2, 1904, stating that Hereros, with or without arms, would be shot, and that the whole nation must leave the country. No attempt was made to negotiate with the rebels. No quarter was given. Women and children were shot or hanged”. Only about 20,000 out of 80,000 escaped from the slaughter.

Among the cruelties, one reads that a practice was to hang natives by means of barbed-wire round their necks. Bodies, too, were found fastened together in graves, with every indication of being buried alive.

This handbook, of course, is biased, and the Foreign Office was making out a case.

But can it all be exaggeration?

Editorial Note

AS the future happiness and progress of humankind, under the new con ditions of communication and transport, depend upon the maintenance of good relations between nations, it follows that the misuse of propaganda and publicity media may be the greatest danger of our era.

Our greatest curse to-day is an ignorant, cockeyed, sensation-loving press. Europe, on September 27, 1938, was on the very brink of a frightful war; and 90 per cent, of the blame for that goes to the news papers. Facts are twisted or half presented, without scruple, so as to play upon racial hatreds and selfish prejudices.

Publicists, to an increasing degree, base their appeals upon a deliberately inade quate survey of the facts.

The handbook quoted by our correspon dent is suspect, because it belongs to the “Hang the Kaiser” period of European politics—when every kind of half-truth was dished up, with imaginative trim mings, to justify the punishment of de feated Germany. Out of that period came the Versailles Treaty—and from the Ver sailles Treaty the sequence of events that brought the world so close to a holocaust that, on September 27, we almost could smell the slaughter and decay and see the crumbling of European civilisation.

There surely is another and a better side to the story of German colonisation.

The “old hands” in New Guinea and Samoa (men whose memories ante-date 1914) do not tell of any atrocities against natives. The Germans were strict, but not viciously cruel, and the natives re spected them. New Guinea and Samoa are npt likely to enter into the pending bargaining about colonies—the scene of territorial rearrangement, presumably, will be laid in Africa—but we can at least judge the Germans by their records in those two Pacific territories.

Mr. and Mrs. D. Munro, accompanied by their two small children Malcolm and Donald, arrived in Sydney from New Guinea recently by the “Macdhui” en route to Perth, Western Australia, where they will spend three months’ furlough before returning to Rabaul. Mr. Munro is a warrant officer in the New Guinea Police Force.