Land Ownership, Colonial Genocide and the Nazi Legacy in Namibia

What are we talking in terms of y- the land here, the farm, uh,

size-wise? How-

14,000 hectare

14,000 hectare?

Yeah.

Okay, cool. And, uh-

You know how much is this? You know, you most probably, m- people have got a,

a, a d- a different

--

Hectare is a difficult one, isn't it?

... understanding for, for size.

Yeah.

14,000 hectare is, like, 14,000 soccer fields,

and then the people will think, "Oh, it's a big farm," and so on.

Yes, it is big,

but

if there's no rainfall, you know, if I've got a smaller farm and you

don't get the rain on this small area, then you're stuck.

Mm. Almost 100,000 German tourists visit

Namibia

each year, and among the souvenirs on sale to them,

I was

horrified to find Nazi memorabilia.

In Germany, this would land the sellers in jail.

Is there a lot of neo-Nazi ... Is there neo-Nazis?

Yeah, there, there are a lot here. There are a lot. There are a lot.

Are here.

E- e- even d- during the, the German g- carnival, they used to parade the, wearing

their, um, their swastikas and, uh, their KKK out-

outfits and, and, and painting f- uh, Black faces, insulting our people,

and, uh, calling us baboons.

Prominent Nazis such as Ritter von Epp and Eugen Fischer

were involved in the atrocities in Namibia.

Von Epp is considered by many to be the ideological godfather

of the early Nazi Party, and Eugen Fischer was a pioneering

eugenicist whose ideas inspired Hitler.

He experimented on the decapitated heads of the Herero and Nama people

to try to justify his theory of white supremacy.

Both von Epp and Fischer were proponents of the theory of

Lebensraum,

or living space, that was central to Nazi ideology, a

theory that justified land grabbing for the white race.

And so historians say it was the genocide in Namibia that laid

the blueprint for the European Holocaust.

Now they want to take back their own, their land, but if you, even if you go to

some of the farms there, they are still having Herero names.

They are still having, uh, Nama names, but they're, those farms are still

being owned by the Germans, the children of the German settlers.