'A certain rigorous treatment of all parts of the nation': the annihilation of the Herero in German South West Africa, 1904 (original) (raw)

In order to define genocide, Helen Fein has proposed a catalogue of questions which not only seek to ascertain the degree of organisation of the perpetrators and the authoritative level at which their genocidal strategies are conceptualised, but also the ideologies, myths and articulated beliefs which justify (or question) such strategies.(1) This chapter, in describing how a German colonial war escalated into the near-annihilation of a whole African people, seeks to consider both the contemporary and historiographical debate regarding the policy making, planning and, indeed, rationalisations of the perpetrators.