The destruction of the Ovaherero and Nama peoples by imperial Germany in its colony of German South-West Africa, present-day Namibia, between 1904 and 1908 — a colonial war of conquest that turned into a deliberate campaign to wipe out two peoples, complete with an explicit extermination order and a system of concentration camps. Widely described as the first genocide of the twentieth century, it killed a very large share of the Herero and roughly half the Nama, though exact figures are estimated and debated. Long neglected, it became the subject of an argument over whether it prefigured later European mass violence, and was officially recognized by Germany only in 2021.
In October 1904, a German general put his policy toward an entire people into writing. Any Herero found inside the German border, he ordered, with or without a weapon, would be shot. Women and children were to be driven back into the desert. Lothar von Trotha did not hide what he intended. He called it the destruction of the Herero nation. That order, and the camps that followed it, are why many historians call this the first genocide of the twentieth century. The harder question is what that phrase commits us to believe about the century that came after.