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Quoting Stephen Joseph Silver’s ‘Invoking a “War Without Hate”: The Second World War in North Africa as a Total War in Experience and Memory’, pages 205–8:

The decline of violence in discussions of the North Africa campaign, as well as the presence of North Africans themselves over the course of the 1950s, occurred alongside a greater emphasis on the German colonial empire of decades past.

Articles, stories, and narratives in Die Oase drew increasing connections between Afrika Korps veterans’ experiences of the Second World War in North Africa and those of earlier colonial soldiers elsewhere on the continent, particularly German Southwest Africa.

The increasing prominence of explicitly colonial experiences, particularly in what is now Namibia, operated in several interconnected ways. On the one hand, colonial narratives normalize the extraordinarily brutal and demoralizing combat waged in North Africa during the Second World War, subsuming the experience instead into a type of post-colonial nostalgia,²²⁵ and white, European, colonial solidarity.²²⁶

On the other, they obfuscated the murderous violence of German colonial warfare, which involved mass murder in both Southwest and Southeast Africa.²²⁷ The violence in these narratives, as it appeared, served to discursively unite the new European allies over a shared British and German colonial past.

Far from an era of “postcolonial amnesia,” in the 1950s and ’60s, West Germany was inundated with discussions of the imperial past.²²⁸ Der Spiegel, for example, printed weekly subsections on “Colonies or “Colonial Politics” and regular uncritical narratives of German colonial history. German popular culture was inundated with colonial imagery in books, television programs, and “Heimat Films.”²²⁹

Adenauer’s Germany was, as discussed above, actively engaged in neocolonial Afrikapolitik and the Eurafrican project, grounded in Cold War “development,” the distribution of financial assistance in the interest of exercising influence, in many cases guided by pre-war colonial experts or advocates.²³⁰

It was in this context that the [Verband deutsches Afrika Korps] announced former colonial soldiers’ suitability for membership at its founding in 1951, and Die Oase dubbed them “Uralten” Afrikaner in its October 1952 issue. The Uralten Afrikaner, the “ancient Africans,” were welcomed join to the “old Africans” who fought during the Second World War.

(Yes, these colonizers had the arrogance to call theirselves ‘Africans’.)

By 1953 and 1954, increasing numbers of these former colonial soldiers regularly attending meetings held by the VDAK branches in Neumunster, Stuttgart, and Hanover. The February 1954 issue of Die Oase published a call by one of them directed at all surviving imperial soldiers to join, specifically naming their experiences during the “Herero Uprising,” the “Hottentot Uprising,” and the First World War.²³¹

The August 1953 issue of Die Oase presented a “Symbolic Community” on its cover: the images of Kesselring, Ludwig Crüwell and Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck.²³² Lettow-Vorbeck, “the undefeated defender of German East Africa,” was declared an honorary member in September of 1952,²³³ and spoke at the Hannover reunion.²³⁴ A VDAK membership list dated 1958 listed 67 active members who were former officers for the imperial defense troops from German Southwest Africa.²³⁵

Colonial veterans’ discussions and descriptions of hardships in the South-West African desert greatly resembled those of those of North Africa: dominated by dust, heat, sand, and confusion. The September 1953 Oase included recollections by Willy Schmidt, an “Uralt-Afrikaner” who had served in German Southwest Afrika, taking part in the construction of the railroad from in 1906.²³⁶

Schmidt detailed his recollections constructing a railroad in the German colony during the “Herero and Hottentot Uprising,” in order to supply colonial troops. The heat was horrendous: “45 degrees above zero in the shade,” in an experience dominated by the “hot African sun.” German Southwest Africa “was a real wild west.” There was inadequate drinking water, unfamiliar conditions, and “there was sand. Sand and again sand” with desert cliffs.

While German soldiers suffered from typhus and dysentery, the worst problem was the experience of “waterlessness” and thirst. The second biggest challenge was the dust and the “shifting dunes,” which led to sandstorms that blinded and confused German troops, making navigation impossible.

Taking their accounts at face value, one would hardly suspect that German Southwest Africa was likely the site of the twentieth century’s first genocide. After decades of German brutality, exploitation, and murder, groups of Namibian Ovaherero and Nama peoples revolted against German colonists, killing over 100 during uprising of 1904.

When German soldiers arrived in force, they faced logistical and environmental conditions described in similar terms to North Africa during the Second World War: distant supply lines, heat, and an unfamiliar desert that made navigation challenging.

Following a campaign marked by massacres and unrestrained violence that culminated in a decisive battle against the Ovaherero at the Waterberg, German General Lothar von Trotha drove most surviving Ovaherero men, women, and children into the desert to die of exposure. Some largely Nama survivors were transported to concentration camps such as Shark Island, which Benjamin Madley calls an “extermination camp,” where they were enslaved, murdered, and worked to death.²³⁷

Estimates of the total number of indigenous dead are between 70 and 80% of a prewar population between 100,000 and 200,000.²³⁸

[…]

Die Oase’s March 1954 issue makes it clear that the desert, a hostile, non-European environment, connected the Uralten and the Afrikaner.

Die Oase argued that Uralten Afrikaner who had fought against the Ovaherero shared a great deal of similarities with the Afrika Korps because they “just like Rommel’s soldiers,” faced a “tropical climate,” fought in the “African desert in thirst and heat,” and waged combat under challenging circumstances.

The Oase emphasized that “It is precisely these reports that connect Rommel’s soldiers with the veterans of the colonial wars because of the same hardships and experiences.”²⁴²

(Emphasis added. Click here if you have time for more.)

Pages 208–212:

Nor would one suspect that the Ovaherero genocide was extraordinarily controversial and divisive to contemporary German opinion. The brutal suppression, as well as its entailing financial costs, featured prominently in the so-called “Hottentot Elections” of December 1906 to January 1907.²³⁹

During the contentious election campaign, the SPD campaigned heavily against the brutal suppression of the revolt. The left-wing Leipziger Volkszeitung, for example, condemned the “barbaric war of extermination” by German settlers against Herero.²⁴⁰

After the First World War, moreover, the Allies used the Ovaherero genocide as evidence that the Germans were unfit colonialists, and the massacres were later emphatically defended in [Fascist]-era textbooks.²⁴¹

Remarkably, in Die Oase, Willy Schmidt referenced this “Shark Island,” identifying it as a barracks for the sick and wounded. He recalled how in the work of constructing the railroad, “24 oxen or mules, with Boers as trek leaders and Hottentots or Hereros as drivers, pulled heavy wagons” with enormous payloads of materials. “Huge clouds of dust enveloped the columns from which the piercing screams and clicking sounds could be heard.”

He proudly concluded with the words of former South African President Herzog at the country’s 300-anniversary celebration in Capetown, how their colonial railroad “played our part in demonstrating German hard work and German entrepreneurship to the world.”

[…]

The April 1954 issue lead with an account of the 50-year celebration of the “Liberation of Omaruru” during the Ovaherero uprising, attended by Heinz-Justis Walbaum in what is now Namibia.²⁴³ This February 1954 ceremony commemorated the 50th anniversary of Captain Victor Franke over the Ovaherero, during which the town marked the occasion with memorabilia displays, uniforms and artifacts, and a large picture of Captain Franke at the town center.

At 9am on February 4, a memorial ceremony was held at the “heroes’ graves” which were decorated with wreaths and flowers. Subsequent ceremonies saw representatives from Germany and South Africa, and soldiers who fought there. Walbaum emphasized the need to also “commemorate the brave South Africans and their families, who were torn from their hard struggle for existence, surprised by the enemy.”

They like the Germans “became warriors overnight and defended Omaruru and the rest of the country against a cruel enemy side by side with the German soldiers and civilians.” Their sacrifice, duty, and loyalty, should be an example to younger generations, so often taken up by “personal selfishness and materialism.”

At the 1958 Bundestreffen at Karlsruhe, Westphal declared that “we Africans [sic] of World War II as well as our older comrades from the Imperial Protection Force… under the leadership of our honorary member Lettow-Vorbeck [are] the guardians of a proud one soldierly tradition.”²⁴⁴

In several issues in 1961, Die Oase published a lengthy exploration of the experiences of one German colonial soldier, Friedrich von Erckert, a German officer who died during the final stage of the Herero and Nama genocide in 1908.²⁴⁵

Erckert’s story was popularized by Hans Grimm, first in the 1926 Volk ohne Raum,²⁴⁶ and then in then in the 1932 Der Zug des Hauptmann von Erckert. Erckert was tasked with brutally suppressing threats German settlements in the Kalahari from surviving Herero and Nama, for which purpose he helped develop the colonial camel corps. He died in a March 1908 battle against the Nama.²⁴⁷ Erckert’s story was taught in schools in some places into the 1950s.²⁴⁸

Die Oase introduced Erckert’s story, including apparent selections from his diary, in terms celebrating the German colonial action: “Erckert wrote down these sentences on his bold march into the Kalahari against the leader of the rebellious Hottentots… where he died on March 16, 1908 in a victorious battle.”

In terms similar to Rommel, Erckert was a “bold and energetic young captain.” He “created the conditions for the responsible operation in the desert against the devious, stubborn enemy, accompanied by a sublime morality.”

The selections emphasized Erckert’s leadership skills, his personal morality and bravery, and his ferocity in the “Hottentot War.” Erckert was known for his “chivalrous, energetic and confident demeanor.”²⁴⁹ And when pitted against the enemy, “in such days there was nothing for him but the enemy and his annihilation.”

The December 1957 issue of Die Oase published a fictional story removed even further in time from the war in North Africa that explicitly united British and Germans in a colonial struggle, “The Germans to the front!”²⁵⁰

The story expressed a sentiment towards the British Empire far removed from the mistrustful and accusatory pieces published in the early issues of Die Oase. Instead, “The Germans to the front!” invokes a colonial myth of white solidarity against “murderous savages.”²⁵¹ This tale luridly narrates heavy combat in Sub-Saharan Africa in the late nineteenth century, including graphic descriptions of machine gun fire and injury.

Set in the period before the First World War, the subject of the story, the title of which was printed in English, is an occasion when “Britons and Germans worked together” in colonial Africa to violently suppress indigenous Africans.

Written from the perspective of a German colonial officer in Cameroon, the narrator proudly announces that the British had reached out to German colonial authorities for assistance: “The colonel and leader of the British border expedition asked for support, asked for German arms help!” The Germans, detached from Cameroon, are “are under English command. The British lead. But we will soon part with our new brothers in arms.”

The European forces are separated by an ambush attack by Africans with “Greedy-cruel-wild-looking faces. Built with sinews, they jump bouncy over low jam hills. Their long hair is braided in strands, decorated with shells and weighted down. Completely naked! Rubbed with palm oil, their bodies shine.”

Assisted by an English Captain, a Scot, and a Liberian, the Germans attempt to fend off the assault with machine-gun fire, because “These Bush[men] do not yet know the terrible weapon used by whites.” John Meier, the protagonist’s Liberian ally, is killed while firing the gun into the crowd of attackers. His “hand was stuck in the feeder… He has a small hole in his skull. The African’s lazily hot red blood oozes from his frizzy woolen head. Even in death the brave would not let go of his belt!”

Fully unleashed and reloaded, “The machine gun barrel now spreads death and ruin among the clumped flood of black, snarling beasts” rushing toward them. The Europeans are victorious, and the Germans are reunited with the main British contingent. They story concludes with a Christmas Eve celebration hosted by the grateful British.