Germany also had its colonies. How they differed from the French or English ones, I will tell you in detail
At the beginning of the 20th century, Western Europeans famously subjugated the world. They turned almost all the countries of Africa and Asia into their meek colonies.
The Germans, like any decent Europeans, also dreamed of their colonies. The German states, Prussia, and Courland acquired small overseas possessions in the New World and Africa as early as the 16th-18th centuries.
However, Germany, which was fragmented until the second half of the 19th century, was too late for the main division of the world. It got into the big colonial race only in the 1870s, when almost all of Africa and Asia were already divided. It was then that Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck approved his own program for the colonial development of the Second Reich.
Speech by German Chancellor von Bülow. Year 1899
Still, the Germans were entrenched in many places around the world at that time. They got their own colonies. Even if they were as close to the scale of the English and French empires as they were on foot to the moon.
In particular, these were German South-East Africa (Deutsch Ostafrika) – the current states of Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzania. German Cameroon. And German Southwest Africa (Deutsch-Südwestafrika) – today’s Namibia. Where, by the way, a few descendants of German settlers of the early 20th century still live.
Namibian Germans – you must admit that such white-skinned men in leather pants are a rare occurrence for modern Africa:)
Another German colony in Africa was Togoland, present-day Togo in the northwest of the Dark Continent.
In Asia, Germany managed to subjugate the northern part of Papua New Guinea, which became German New Guinea. Part of the neighboring islands of Samoa, the Marshall Islands, and the island of Nauru.
Neu-Guinea – German New Guinea
And the Chinese port of Qingdao – the Germans captured this city, suppressing, together with the rest of the Europeans, the anti-colonial so-called Boxer Rebellion of the Qin in the early 1900s. The Fritzes managed to bring here strong beer traditions, which are alive in Qingdao to this day.
Qingdao, thanks to the Germans, is still the beer capital of China
This is how the Germans got a colonial empire:
German colonies in 1914
I would like to note that Germany has never prioritized its colonies. the Second Reich needed these pieces of land more for international prestige and tick the box. Like, the rest of us have it, but why are we worse?
Germany focused more on development in Europe itself. And the colonies served Berlin as a small stable source of income.
German soldiers in captured Chinese Tsingtao
Unlike the rest of the European powers, Germany did not seek to resettle its subjects en masse in the colonies. For example, in Togoland, at its peak in 1914, there were no more than 800-900 Germans. With the total population of the colony of one million people. About 4,000 Germans settled in Tanzania, where up to 8 million people lived at the time.
At the same time, the Germans were distinguished by perhaps the most terrible of Europeans cruelty to the local enslaved population. The prudent Deutsches, according to the good old Prussian tradition, squeezed their relatively small colonies, as they say, dry. Taking out any riches found from here.
A German colonist gets high in Togoland. Early 20th century
In the German colonies, serfdom was essentially revived. Non-private Africans were forced to plow for most of the year for their blond masters – consider it corvée.
The Germans did not take Africans themselves for people at all – it was in Germany that white racism was invented in its best form.
It is not surprising that enslaved Africans regularly rebelled against the German invaders.
But the Germans mercilessly slaughtered any disobedient to zero. In particular, by pitting some Africans against others, as, for example, in Tanzania.
This is the case, for example, with the Herero and Nama peoples in Namibia. The Germans committed a natural genocide against these African tribes, the first in the 20th century, if anything. They made a scorched earth herero and nama. Concentration camps were set up for the poor fellows, where the Herero and Nama were used as hard labor. In general, the Hans gloriously rehearsed the future Jewish Holocaust on Africans, if anything.
Herero men chained by the Germans
As expected, Germany lost all its colonies as a result of the defeat in the First World War – they were divided among the victorious powers. That is, England, France, the United States, Japan and Portugal.
However, German society for a long time experienced phantom pains at the fact of the loss of its overseas possessions. For example, one of Hitler’s first political promises in the 1930s was to return the Reich to its former African colonies.
Fortunately, it didn’t work. And African countries, which were once German colonies, to this day demand compensation from Berlin for predatory plundering and genocide. For example, Burundi insists that the Germans pay it about $50 million…