Published: 7 May 2016
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Scholars commonly say the Armenian genocide of 1914-1915, perpetrated by the Turks, was the first genocide of the 20th century. That is wrong. History records the first deliberate effort to systematically exterminate an entire group was by the Germans in Southwest Africa, 1904-1908. Decades before the Nazis turned to the Jews, German colonialists in Southwest Africa – now Namibia – dehumanised, built death camps for, and slaughtered tens of thousands of Herero and Nama tribespeople in a systematic genocide. Edwin Black reveals the horrors of an eerie and odious precursor of the Shoah, and its legacy in the USA.
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