Heute möchte ich einfach mal einen kurzen, aber knackigen Artikel mit euch teilen, denn während man in Europa grade diskutiert, ob man den Genozid an den Armeniern nun auch offiziell so bezeichnen darf, will oder muss, macht hier etwas ganz anderes Furore: Der erste Genozid des 20. Jahrhunderts war der Völkermord an den Herero und Nama, dabei wurden 80% der Herero und 50% der Nama ermordet. Deutschland hat diesen Genozid bis heute nicht offiziell eingestanden.
The pope’s description of the Armenian massacre as “the first genocide of the 20th century” was simply incorrect. That grim distinction belongs to the genocide that imperial Germany unleashed a decade earlier against the Herero and Nama, two ethnic groups who lived in the former colony of South West Africa, modern Namibia.
The Namibian genocide, 1904-1909, was not only the first of the 20th century; in so many ways, it also seemed to prefigure the later horrors of that troubled century. The systematic extermination of around 80% of the Herero people and 50% of the Nama was the work both of German soldiers and colonial administrators; banal, desk-bound killers. The most reliable figures estimate 90,000 people were killed.
[…]After military attempts to bring this about had been thwarted, the liquidation of the surviving Herero, along with the Nama people, was continued in concentration camps, a term that was used at the time for the archipelago of facilities the Germans built across Namibia. Some of the victims of the Namibian genocide were transported to those camps in cattle trucks and the bodies of some of the victims were subjected to pseudoscientific racial examinations and dissections.“
QUELLE: David Olusoga:Dear Pope Francis, Namibia was the 20th century’s first genocide