Martin Heidegger's Racialist Friend - Nazi Anthropologist Eugen Fischer

Prof. Dr. Eugen Lenz (1874-1967) was the. first director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Hereditary Teaching and Eugenics in Berlin-Dahlem, established in 1927 upon his initiative. Already in 1913, Fischer earned a reputation by publishing his field research concerning the questions of race crossbreeding in the colony of German-Southwest-Africa (today; Namibia). He stood for an absolute prohibition of mixed marriages within the colonies.The Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute actively participated in the Nazi policy of racism, in his function of government consultant within the expert committee on demography and racial policy, Fischer, together with Fritz Lenz, planned the enforced sterilization of the so-called "Rhineland bastards", "half-breeds"; who were the descendants of German women and African or Asian colonial soldiers, born during the Rhineland occupation of the years 1920-1927. In 1945, Fischer was denazified as a "follower". In 1952, he became honorary president of the newly founded German Anthropological Society

Eugen Fischer)

Contrary to the popular assumptions about concentration camps, the first concentrationcamps actually happened in 1904-1907 in a region of German South Africa which is part of present day Namibia. Led by Lt. General Lothar von Trotha, the Germans of South West Africa began placing a group of natives known as the Herero tribe into concentration camps. Before the camps the Herero numbered 80,000 and after the camps they numbered less than 15,000

During this time, a man named Dr. Eugen Fischer was invited to German Southwest Africa as an anthropologist to study the Herero. He wrote the famed book Principles of Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene in which he claimed that the Herero were animals, that the German race was superior and he applauded the concentration camps. While Adolf Hitler was jailed, he read Dr. Fisher's book. Fischer's ideas of a German supreme race and the ideas for concentration camps inspired Adolf Hitler to write Mein Kampf

Many people attack Hitler without looking at Dr. Fischer, when Fischer was Hitler's inspiration and where Hitler got all of his ideas about race, genetics and the ideas of concentration camps in the first place. You could say that Adolf Hitler was both Eugen Fischer's pet and creation.

Before Hitler came to power in 1925, Dr. Fischer was the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics. One of Dr. Fischer's students was none other than Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd who went back to South Africa and became the drafter of Apartheid and Prime Minister of South Africa (Verwoerd being Adolf Hitler II, Fischer's second pet and second creation in South Africa) . During this time, the Rockefeller Foundation was funding Dr. Fischer and his genetic and geneology research. In 1929, Fischer and many other doctors began a project chosing 63 research sites to do studies on family geneology, craniometry, and blood group testings. The others involved in this five year project included the Kaiser predecessor Rudolph Martin (1864-1926), Otto Aichel (1871-1935) director of the Anthropology Institute of Kiel University, Egon Frieherr von Eickstadt (1892-1965) director of the Institute at Breslau, Otto Reche (1979-1966) director of the state research institute for ethnic studies at Leipzig, Ernst Rudin (1874-1952) head of the geneological and demographic department of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and others such as Walter Scheidt

(1895-1976), Karl Saller (1902-1969), and Theodor Mollison (1874-1952). The project was completed in 1934 right after Hitler came to power in a series known as The German Races: Studies on Race, Lineage, Volkstum and Families of the German People .

Hitler, being Fischer's pet, began implimenting the sterilization program against blacks, Jews and gypsies, using Fischer's study to justify it. And in 1934, Hitler placed Dr. Eugen Fischer in charge of training the SS doctors who later performed all their experiments on Jews, blacks, gypsies, gays and soldiers in the concentration camps. Dr. Fischer gave his first courses on eugenics to the SS doctors at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in 1934. Hitler then placed Dr. Fischer in charge of the Anthropology, Hereditary Biology and Race Hygiene Department at University of Berlin where he continued to train SS doctors for the prison camps and he continued his dialogues and associations with other previous students around the world with discussions on their "research." (9, 19, 22, 37, 46, 50). In either 1938 or 1939, Dr. Fischer published Racial Origin and the Racial History of the Hebrews which Hitler, his biggest fan, also read (14). Although the book contained much false information about the Jews and their heritage, Hitler took the book to be factual and began sending the Jews into the concentration camps for genocide. At the same time, Dr. Otmar Verschuer, who later became Fischer's successor at the University, published Racial Biology of the Jews which also made Hitler's nightstand (18).

The Nazi doctors began all sorts of unethical, cruel and genocidal experiments on the Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and blacks, many of which were Fischer's SS trained doctors (2, 9, 39, 44, 50). A series of letters were put forth in the Nuremberg Trials on the internet in the Mazal Library documenting viral experiments of Dr. Eugen Haagen, SS Dr. Kurt Gutzeit, and SS Dr. Arnold Dohmen (13, 15, 35, 39, 40, 47). The letters discuss a meeting between Handloser, Haagen, Schreiber, Gutzeit, Ernst Grawitz, Dohmen, and Rudolf Brandt. Dr. Haagen a major in the Medical Corps and Director of the Hygenic Institute of Reich University of Strausberg (7) was the superior doctor to SS Dr. Kurt Gutzeit who was a personnel member living at Auschwitz. Dr. Arnold Dohmen was Dr. Gutzeit's assistant (39). The three of them were mainly doing experiments with various animal viruses and human viruses such as hepatitis. Gutzeit would write Haagen on their progression and successes with their experiments. Dr. Haagen would make requests for healthy people, mainly Jews, Russian soldiers caught during the war, and gypsies (47). The people were injected with various forms of what the doctors referred to as the "Jaundice Virus" which was another word for Hepatitis (35). Although Dr. Dohmen was also a SS doctor living at Auschwitz, he was reprimanded by his superior officer Dr. Gutzeit because Dohmen only wanted to work with the animals rather than the people. The animal-human mixed viruses were instead injected into the people, not only at Auschwitz, but apparently Dr. Dohmen was also doing the Hepatitis experiments at Sachsenhausen (13). In one specific letter to Dr. Haagen, Dr. Gutzeit noted his and Dr. Dohmen's successes in experiments involving the "Nephritis Virus" along with Hepatitis Viruses (40).

Nephritis is a non-human virus, but a virus only found in rabbits and mice. It is highly unlikely that in the middle of WWII that two SS doctors living at Auschwitz would be trying to save the bunny rabbits of the world from the Nephritis Virus. We know that the successes to which Dr. Gutzeit was referring to were experiments of a Nephritis Virus on human beings, more than likely prisoners in the camps of Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen. Considering that the rest of the experiments of the time had to do with forms of "Jaundice Virus" or the Hepatitis Virus, this was more than likely some sort of cross-breed virus between the two.

Hepatitis G was discovered in 1996, a new form of Hepatitis (12, 26, 27, 54). In January of 2003, a group of doctors linked Hepatitis G to a cross between Hepatitis and GlomeruloNephritis (54). To this date the only known doctors in the world to have been conducting unethical experiments with a "Nephritis Virus" and a Hepatitis Virus were Drs. Haagen, Gutzeit, and Dohmen. When we look at the world-wide prevelance of Hepatitis G, we can see that some of the highest rates of infection fell behind the Iron Curtain after Russia liberated Sachsenhausen (49). Those areas fall between the rates of 1.2%-3% of the populations of countries like Czechoslovakia being infected with this hybrid Hepatitis/Nephritis virus (26). The Sachsenhausen concentration camp had the highest number of Russian-captured soldiers in it at the end of WWII, when Russia liberated it in 1945. Only 3000 people were rescued, in no condition for marching and with all due respect to reality, soldiers do have the tendency to buy prostitutes which could account for present-day infection rate figures being that Hepatitis G is also a sexually transmitted disease. Being that the disease fell behind the Iron Curtain after the war, the curtain seemed to act as a barrier between the then Communist infection and the rest of Europe and when Hepatitis G was discovered in Finland it was thought to be a rare disease, however, as we will later learn, it's not rare at all.

What happened to the seven Nazis associated with these cross-species virus experiments on humans? SS Dr. Siegfriend Handloser, the Chief of the Medical Service of the Armed Forces went before the Nuremberg Trials on other indictments and was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. His sentence was reduced to 20 years on appeal. Dr. Schreiber was also tried. Dr. Rudolf Brandt, the Personal Administrative Officer to Himmler was sentenced to death by hanging and hung on June 2, 1948 (60). Dr. Ernst Grawitz committed suicide (56). Dr. Eugen Haagen testified in the trial of Dr. Ding (20) but was never really charged with anything himself despite the overwhelming amount of evidence against him in the form of letters. Apparently, according to several sources, Dr. Haagen was given a new identity by the American CIA in the Project Paperclip Program by Boris Pash (8, 45). No one knows what happened to Dr. Gutzeit nor Dr. Dohmen after the war. Since Haagen was never charged with anything, neither were they and apparently there were several groups that had governmental interest to see to it that they disappeared. They remain on the Auschwitz's list of personnel as "Fate Unknown" (53).

Although many would be likely to point the finger once again at the American CIA for Dr. Gutzeit and Dr. Dohmen, in addition to Dr. Haagen, I would find this highly illogical and here's why. Dr. Gutzeit was clearly military personnel, somewhat brutal military personnel and would not have been a likely choice in the Project Paperclip Program as he had lived at Auschwitz for too many years. Dr. Haagen, on the other hand, was a professor, a teacher living in a cozy home away from that kind of environment teaching classes and thus, a candidate to teach Americans on what sick viruses that the German's had created. If the CIA had Dr. Haagen, they wouldn't need Dr. Gutzeit, nor Dr. Dohmen. Dr. Haagen received all the reports on the different experiments that the other doctors had conducted, Dohmen's, Gutzeit's and others. There was always the possibility that Dr. Dohmen could have been at Sachsenhausen when the Russians liberated it and if so, it could be equally likely that the Russians had one of the other two doctors as well. Since Dr. Dohmen didn't want to be injecting people with diseases in the first place but wanted to work with animals instead, either the Russians or the Americans could have taken him as well. Surely the CIA had a National Security Interest in protecting the American public from these newly created German cross-species viruses.

So the best way to find the two missing doctors is to track down at least one of their creations, Hepatitis G. In doing so we find that neither Russia, nor Czechoslovakia, nor America, nor Germany has the most number of Hepatitis G cases, but rather South Africa has the highest number of Hepatitis G cases, where 20% of the blacks (not whites) are infected with Hepatitis G (54). This 20% infection rate among blacks-only in South Africa is extremely unusual. We know that by the normal course of a sexually transmitted disease between soldiers, prostitutes and the community, that infection rates behind the Iron Curtain from 1945-2000 became 1.2%-3% of the population infected (26). Yet blacks, no where near Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen have a 20% infection rate and it's highly unlikely that the blacks in South Africa had sex any more frequently than Russian soldiers and prostitutes. The only likely way that the blacks in South Africa could have such high infection rates is if a group of doctors intentionally infected them with the hybrid hepatitis/nephritis Hepatitis G virus. So how did the virus get down to South Africa?

I'm not entirely sure if that can be explained at the moment and I invite others to further this research. There are answers to puzzles that lie in both the history of South Africa and German SouthWest Africa, present-day Namibia. After WWI, German South Africa became a protectorate of the League of Nations and then under British control for the most part. During WWII, the British army took 1,220 Germans who may have had associations with the Nazi party, Hitler or Fischer and placed them in Intern Camps in another city in South Africa. Other Germans were placed on house or farm arrest during the war. After WWII, those Germans were released back to their homes in 1946 (rather than 1945 when the war ended). In 1947, those Germans began organizing to try and regain their political power once again within the South African government (30).

Many of these Germans were indeed Nazis and the South West German portion of South Africa even had a square named after Adolf Hitler after WWII. In 1947, the South African Governor General G. Brand van Zyl was apparently worried about some of the Germans in this region and had a list of 234 that he wanted to deport back to Germany. However, with the elections of 1948, the Germans had regained their political power in the South African government in full-force and those on General van Zyl's list were never deported (30). The Dutch Dr. Daniel Malan became the Prime Minister of South Africa in 1948 (5), yet another doctor.

Dr. Daniel Malan had previously attended Victoria College in Stellenbosch and was from the region of South Africa known as Rhodesia, or present-day Zimbabwe (5). Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd had previously been a student of Stellenbosch University by Capetown before studying under SS doctor-trainer Dr. Eugen Fischer in Berlin (16). Dr. Malan, the Prime Minister of South Africa in 1948 considered Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd a friend and also firmly believed in Verwoerd's drafting of Apartheid. Apartheid was really no different than concentration camps of Namibia and Germany. The idea behind Apartheid was forcing the blacks to live away from the whites in other communities, sterilizing the blacks, prohibiting intermarriages between whites and blacks, and obviously, the same Nazi doctor medical experiments on the black populations that were conducted up in Nazi Germany. In 1950, Prime Minister Malan appointed Dr. Verwoerd to be the Minister of Native Affairs placing him in charge of all blacks of South Africa, Dr. Eugen Fischer's Second Hitler (5). Around the same year of 1950, several new laws were passed such as the Prohibition of Marriages Between Whites and Blacks (51), blacks were forced to relocate to the outskirts of each town or the white-policed zones, and new laws were passed specifically to separate poor whites away from blacks by giving poor whites property and taking all property rights from blacks (30).

These are the actions of men that intended to begin medical experiments and genocide of one race over another. We find that it is a common trait of those who attempt to commit genocide or to conduct unethical medical experiments that they would separate their human subjects for experiments away from the rest of the population and such was the case with Dr. Verwoerd and Dr. Malan and the idea of Apartheid, a German/Dutch supremacy of false lineage written up by Dr. Fischer on German roots and the idea of Afrikaaners, "white Africans". As you will recall, when Dr. Verwoerd studied in Berlin under Dr. Fischer the project of that time was establishing 63 sites to conduct research for blood tests, ancestry tests, craniometry and family geneology (48). Presumably Dr. Fischer would have at least chosen the original site for his book on Principles of Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene in German South West Africa, present day Namibia. Dr. Fischer would have also chosen other German communities in South Africa, such as the German population in Stellenbosch. Other sites may have included the German populations in Tangayika (present day Tanzania), Cameroon, Togo, and other German populated areas of the African continent.

When looking for the names of Gutzeit and Dohmen we do find the name Gutzeit to be common in South Africa, but as yet, no direct link to Dr. Kurt Gutzeit and anyone else is welcome to further that research to account for all Gutzeits in South Africa to see if any of them trace to SS Dr. Gutzeit. Noting the demographics of other Hepatitis Viruses we find some interesting things. Hepatitis D, Hepatitis E, and Hepatitis F have fixed geographic locations. Hepatitis D, in particular, also a sexually transmitted virus is fixed among the Equatorial region of Africa, the Mediterranean, Brazil, and the Middle East. Hepatitis D does not appear to be a normal virus either, but a bio-engineered virus. Hepatitis D has incomplete RNA, which doesn't happen naturally in the world of known nature (24, 25, 52). There are four viruses at present known to humankind with incomplete RNA: Hepatitis D, a strain of Influenza type A, HIV, and a plant virus that feeds off tobacco plants called Tobacco Mosaic Virus. Since tobacco is a pesticide itself, when pesticide companies try to come up with pesticides to kill parasites that feed off pesticides (tobacco) they have to use some pretty unorthodox methods. It is highly likely that through a process known as viral splicing (52) that either accidentally or purposely the Tobacco Mosaic Virus was created. Hepatitis D and its incomplete RNA is dependent on Hepatitis B and if a person has Hepatitis D, they also have Hepatitis B. It is impossible to have Hepatitis D without Hepatitis B, for Hepatitis D is dependent upon Hepatitis B's RNA structure to compensate for its incomplete RNA structure (24, 25). Hepatitis B being the original virus and Hepatitis D being artificially created by the splicing process. HIV is the other virus with incomplete RNA seeking human cells to complete its RNA (52, 36).

When we look into the predecessor animal viruses the SIV, Simian Immuno-deficiency Virus of primates and monkeys, before HIV (36), there are some interesting facts about the animals. Modern science has definitively found the SIV-1 predecessor to HIV-1 in Chimpanzees, specifically from the region of Cameroon (11, 43). Chimpanzees do not cross water and are deathly afraid of water and stay in specific areas never intermixing between chimpanzees across the African continent. HIV-1 could not be a natural phenomenon for if it were the region that should be the most infected with the virus should be the region around Cameroon, the chimpanzees natural habitat (click to View Africa Map 1). The region around Cameroon only has a 5.1%-10% infection rate of HIV-1 among the population, which although high, is not the highest rates in Africa. The highest rates in Africa for HIV-1 stem from the areas that used to be South Africa before they separated into different countries: Namibia 20% population infected, South Africa 19.9% of population infected, Swaziland 25% of population infected, Lesotho 24% of population infected, Zambia 20% of population infected, Zimbabwe 25% of population infected, Botswana 16% of population infected (click to View Africa Map 1). Clearly if HIV-1 happened naturally, since the chimpanzees don't cross water, the South African country of Dr. Verwoen's and Dr. Malan's 1950-1966 reign should not have higher rates than Cameroon, but South Africa does have double or more the HIV-1 rates than the area around the chimpanzees natural habitat.

Angola its Portuguse colonized neighbor, separating the Cameroon chimps from South Africa only has a 1.1%-5.0% population infection rate (click to View Africa Map 1). Somehow, the German chimp Cameroon SIV-predecessor didn't infect the blacks in Cameroon nearly as much as it infected South Africa and it seemed to skip a lot over Angola. Simultaneously, HIV-1 and Hepatitis G infect an almost equal number of blacks in South Africa roughly a 20%/20% figure of the population infected with both diseases (54).

When researching HIV-2 comes yet another complexity. The SIV-2, Simian Immune-deficiency Virus predecessor for HIV-2 didn't come from chimpanzees at all, but from sooty matabeys who have even less genetic similarities to humans. The matabeys come pretty much from the area around German colonized Togo in equatorial Africa (click to View Africa Map 1). Although the HIV-2 statistics were incomplete on the 2000 figures we find that HIV-2 populates the same equatorial region as Hepatitis D.

So 20% of the population is infected with HIV-1 (cross-species virus) in South African areas of the Malan/Verwoerd administration in present day and 20% of the black population is also infected with Hepatitis G, the Gutzeit/Dohmen WWII creation of a cross between rabbit virus Nephritis and Hepatitis. The equatorial region of Africa infected with HIV-2 is also infected with Hepatitis D which has a fixed geography.

Who would use German chimpanzees for animal experiments and who would use German matabeys for animal experiments? The British would have no use for German chimpanzees because they could get their chimpanzees from Kenya and Tanzania if they wanted to conduct animal experiments on chimpanzees. The Belgians and French would have no use for German chimpanzees, for they could get their chimpanzees from Congo. And since chimpanzees never cross water unless man takes them out of their habitat and puts them on a plane or ship, the only people that would be using both German chimpanzees and German matabeys in animal experiments would be Germans, like Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd or Dr. Eugen Fischer or Dr. Kurt Gutzeit or Dr. Arnold Dohmen or any SS trained doctor or student doctor of Dr. Fischer-who trained all SS doctors. We do know for a fact that Nazi doctors were working on cross-species sexually transmitted viruses between animals and humans during WWII (13, 15, 35, 39,40, 47).

The further puzzling mystery within South Africa among HIV-1 cases is the 25% population infection rates of Zimbabwe (Dr. Malan's birthplace [5]), 25% population rates of infection in Swaziland (the place where Dr. Verwoen's assassin was from [1]), and the 24% population rates of infection in Lethoso. From the spread of newly formed sexually transmitted diseases among soldiers and prostitutes, the worst spreaders, we find that in Russia/Czechoslovakia that after 55 years only 1.2%-3% of the population would be infected with Hepatitis G. Swaziland's, Lethoso's, and Zimbabwe's infection rates are above this 3% threshold between their countries and the rest of South Africa from 1950-2000, so there may be some additional factor in those countries.

Surely the creators of such hybrid viruses would behave the same as the Nazis did after WWII. The Nazi doctors and those working in the camps just tried to claim that the Jews, gypsies, gays, blacks, and soldiers of other nations supposedly got sick on their own. This, however, was not the case and those people were intentionally injected with various diseases on purpose and studied like guinea pigs having their body parts removed for research. If the drafters of Apartheid were confronted on the same question with regards to South Africa, I'm sure they'd react no differently. Right now, they still try to make stories up about blacks eating monkeys or point the fingers at the Belgians or maybe still blame it on the blacks "genetics" or blaming homosexuals. Hepatitis G was manufactured in a laboratory, a cross between rabbit virus Nephritis and Hepatitis and the Nazis were the only known group to experiment with such viruses and to have succeeded with it (40). Since 20% of the blacks in South Africa are infected with Hepatitis G and an almost equal number with HIV-1 (another animal virus-human virus), such infection rates could have never happened naturally but only through Dr. Eugen Fischer's ideas of concentration camps/Apartheid (Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd) and experiments of SS trained doctors doing medical research on them.

Just as Adolf Hitler was Dr. Eugen Fischer's pet in Germany, apparently Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd (Minister of Native Affairs 1950/Prime Minister 1958-1966) was Dr. Fischer's pet in South Africa.

Werke

Only 90 years ago, the agents of King Leopold II of Belgium massacred 10 million Africans in the Congo. Cutting off hands as we see in Sierra Leone today, was very much part of Leopold's repertoire. Today, Leopold's "rubber terror" has all been swept under the carpet. Adam Hochschild calls it "the great forgetting" in his brilliant new book, King Leopold's Ghost, recently published by Macmillan. This is a story of greed, exploitation and brutality that Africa and the world must not forget.

This story is actually best understood when told in reverse order. Leopold never set foot in "his" Congo Free State - for all the 23 years (1885-1908) he ruled what Hochschild calls "the world's only colony claimed by one man".

It was a vast territory which "if superimposed on the map of Europe", says Hochschild, "would stretch from Zurich to Moscow to central Turkey. It was bigger than England, France, Germany, Spain and Italy combined. Although mostly rainforest and savannah, it also embraced volcanic hills and mountains covered by snow and glaciers, some of whose peaks reached higher than the Alps."

Leopold's "rubber terror" raised a lot of hairs in Britain, America and continental Europe (particularly between the years 1900-1908). But while they were condemning Leopold's barbarity, his accusers were committing much the same atrocities against Africans elsewhere on the continent.

Hochschild tells it better: "True, with a population loss estimated at 10 million people, what happened in the Congo could reasonably be called the most murderous part of the European Scramble for Africa. But that is so only if you look at sub-Saharan Africa as the arbitrary checkerboard formed by colonial boundaries.

"With a decade of [Leopold's] head start [in the Congo], similar forced labour systems for extracting rubber were in place in the French territories west and north of the Congo River, in Portuguese-ruled Angola, and in the nearby Cameroon under the Germans.

"In France's equatorial African territories, where the region's history is best documented, the amount of rubber-bearing land was far less than what Leopold controlled, but the rape was just as brutal. Almost all exploitable land was divided among concession companies. Forced labour, hostages, slave chains, starving porters, burned villages, paramilitary company 'sentries', and the chicotte were the order of the day. [The chicotte was a vicous whip made out of raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide, cut into a long sharp-edged cork-screw strip. It was applied to bare buttocks, and left permanent scars. Twenty strokes of it sent victims into unconsciousness; and a 100 or more strokes were often fatal. The chicotte was freely used by both Leopold's men and the French].

"Thousands of refugees who had fled across the Congo River to escape Leopold's regime eventually fled back to escape the French [in Congo-Brazzaville]. The population loss in the rubber-rich equatorial rainforest owned by France is estimated, just as in Leopold's Congo, at roughly 50%."

Hochschild cannot fathom how the reform movement in Europe focused exclusively on Leopold's Congo when "if you reckon [the] mass murder by the percentage of the population killed", the Germans did as much in Namibia, if not worse, than Leopold in Congo.

"By these standards", Hochschild argues, "the toll was even worse among the Hereros in German South West Africa, today's Namibia. The killing there was masked by no smokescreen of talk about philanthropy. It was genocide, pure and simple, starkly announced in advance.

"After losing much of their land to the Germans, the Hereros rebelled in 1904. In response, Germany sent in a heavily armed force under Lt-Gen Lothar von Trotha, who issued an extermination order (Vernichtungsbefehl):

'Within the German boundaries every Herero, whether found with or without a rifle, with or without cattle, shall be shot... Signed: The Great General of the Mighty Kaiser, von Trotha.'

"In case everything was not clear, an addendum specified: 'No male prisoners will be taken."

By the time von Trotha's murderous hordes had finished their job in 1906, fewer than 20,000 of the 80,000 Herreros who lived in Namibia in 1903 remained.

"The others [more than 60,000 of them]", writes Hochschild, "had been driven into the desert to die of thirst (the Germans poisoned the waterholes), were shot, or - to economise on bullets - bayoneted or clubbed to death with rifle stocks."

Hochschild tries to be fair here by pointing to what the Americans and the British were doing, or had done, elsewhere.

"Around the time the Germans were slaughtering the Hereros," he writes, "the world was largely ignoring America's brutal counter-guerrilla war in the Phillipines, in which US troops tortured prisoners, burned villages, killed 20,000 rebels, and saw 200,000 more Filipinos die of war-related hunger or disease.

"Britain [too] came in for no international criticism for its killings of Aborigines in Australia, in accordance with extermination orders as ruthless as Von Trotha's. And, of course, in neither Europe nor the United States was there major protest against the decimation of the American Indians."

Hochschild then poses the controversial question: "When these other mass murders went largely unnoticed except by their victims, why, in England and the United States, was there such a storm of righteous protest about the Congo?"

He answers the question himself: "What happened in the Congo was indeed mass murder on a vast scale, but the sad truth is that the men who carried it out for Leopold were no more murderous than many Europeans then at work or at war elsewhere in Africa. Conrad said it best [in his book, Heart of Darkness, based on the brutalities in the Congo]: 'All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz'."

Kurtz is Joseph Conrad's lead character in Heart of Darkness. He is "both a murderous head collector and an intellectual, an emissary of science and progress, a painter, a poet and a journalist, and an author of a 17-page report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, at the end of which he scrawls in shaky hand: 'Exterminate all the brutes'."

Hochshild believes that Kurtz was Leon Rom in real life. Rom was born in Mons in Belgium. Poorly educated, he joined the Belgian army aged 16. Nine years later, aged 25 in 1886, he found himself in the Congo in search of adventure. He became district commissioner at Matadi and was later put in charge of the African troops in Leopold's murderous Force Publique army in the Congo.

Rom's brutality knew no bounds. It was such that even the white people working with him were shocked to their boots.

"When Rom was station chief at Stanley Falls," Hochshild reveals, "the governor general sent a report back to Brussels about some agents who 'have the reputation of having killed masses of people for petty reasons'. He mentions Rom's notorious flower bed rigged with human heads, and then adds: 'He kept a gallows permanently erected in front of the station'."

Conrad had himself gone to Congo in 1890 at the time Rom was committing his atrocities. "The moral landscape of Heart of Darkness", writes Hochshild, "and the shadowy figure at its centre are the creations not just of a novelist but of an open-eyed observer who caught the spirit of a time and place with piercing accuracy."

So, how did Leopold come to own such a vast territory, exploited it, killed its people, took away its riches and never set foot in it?

Three things stand out in this sad story - the naivety of the African kings and people; the misfits of Europe sent to subdue the Africans; and the superior weapons of war that the Europeans possessed which the Africans lacked.

When the first Europeans (the Portuguese) arrived in Congo in 1482, they met a thriving African kingdom. "Despite the contempt for Kongo culture," says Hochschild, "the Portuguese grudgingly recognised in the kingdom a sophisticated and well-developed state - the leading one on the west coast of central Africa. It was an imperial federation, of two or three million people, covering an area roughly 3,000 sq miles, some of which lie today in several countries after the Europeans had drawn arbitrary border lines across Africa in 1886."

The great fascination of the Congo at the time was its mighty 3,000-mile river, variously called Lualaba, Nzadi or Nzere by the people who lived on its banks. Nzere means "the river that swallows all rivers" because of its many tributaries. Just one tributary, the Kasai, carries as much water as Europe's longest river, the Volga in Russia and it is half as long as the Rhine. Another tributary, the Ubangi is even longer. On Portuguese tongue, Nzere became Zaire which was adopted by Mobutu when he renamed the country in 1971. Like most things African, the Europeans changed the river's name to Congo.

In 1482 when the Portuguese sailor Diogo C%o accidentally came upon the river as it emptied into the Atlantic, he was astounded by its sheer size. "Modern oceanographers", writes Hochschild, "have discovered more evidence of the great river's strength in its 'pitched battle with the ocean': a 100-mile-long canyon, in place 4,000 feet deep, that the river has carved out of the sea floor... It pours some 1.4 million cubic feet of water per second into the ocean; only the Amazon carries more water."

Thanks to satellite technology, the world now knows that much of the river's basin lies on a plateau which rises nearly 1,000 feet high 220 miles from the Atlantic coast. Thus the river descends to sea level in a furious 220-mile dash down the plateau.

"During this tumultous descent," writes Hochshild, "the river squeezes through narrow canyons, boils up in waves of 40 feet high, and tumbles over 32 separate cataracts. So great is the drop and the volume of water that these 220 miles have as much hydroelectric potential as all the lakes and rivers of the United States combined."

In all, the river (Africa's second longest) drains more than 1.3 million square miles, "an area larger than India," Hochschild testifies. "It has an estimated one-sixth of the world's hydroelectric potential... Its fan-shaped web of tributaries constitute more than seven thousand miles of interconnecting waterways, a built-in transportation grid rivalled by few places on earth."

Thus, Congo was a jewel any colonialist would kill for. And the lot fell to Henry Morton Stanley to colonise it for King Leopold II.

Stanley was Welsh but he passed himself round as an American. He had first stumbled on the river on his second trip to Africa. Because the river flowed north from this point, Stanley thought it was the Nile.

Stanley's background tells a lot about the brutality he unleashed on the Africans he met on his journeys. He had been born a "bastard" in the small Welsh market town of Denbigh on 28 January 1841. His mother, Betsy Parry (a housemaid) had recorded him on the birth register of St Hillary's Church in Denbigh as "John Rowlands, Bastard". His father was believed to be a local drunkard called John Rowlands who died of delirium tremens, a severe pyschotic condition occurring in some alcoholics.

John Rowlands Bastard was the first of his mother's five illegitimate children. After an exceptionally difficult childhood spent with foster parents and in juvenile workhouses, John Rowlands Bastard moved to New Orleans (USA) in February 1859 where he changed his name several times - sometimes calling himself Morley, Morelake and Moreland. Finally he settled on Henry Morton Stanley which he claimed was the name of a rich benefactor he lived with in New Orleans.

Stanley would become a soldier, sailor, newspaperman and famous explorer feted by the high and mighty on both sides of the Atlantic. He was knighted by Britain and elected to parliament.

Though records show that Stanley wrote love letters to at least three women, he himself confessed despairingly in 1886: "The fact is, I can't talk to women". He eventually married "the eccentric high-society portrait painter" Dorothy Tennant on 12 July 1890 in a lavish wedding ceremony at Westminster Abbey in London, attended by the good and great of Britain, including Prime Minister Gladstone. Yet, Hochschild provides evidence showing that Stanley's "great fear of women" prevented him from ever consummating his marriage.

After his honeymoon, Stanley himself wrote in his dairy; "I do not regard it wifely, to procure these pleasures, at the cost of making me feel like a monkey in a cage". To which his biographer, Frank McLynn adds: "Stanley's fear of women was so great that when he was finally called upon to satisfy a wife, [he] in effect broke down and confessed that he considered sex for the beasts."

Hochschild adds his own telling comment: "Whether this inference is right or wrong, the inhibitions that caused Stanley so much pain are a reminder that the explorers and soldiers who carried out the European seizure of Africa were often not the bold, bluff, hardy men of legend, but restless, unhappy, driven men, in flight from something in their past or in themselves. The economic explanations of imperial expansion -the search for raw materials, labour and markets - are all valid, but there was pyschological fuel as well."

Here Stanley had a common link with his ultimate employer, King Leopold II. Hochschild tells how the "loveless marriage" of Leopold's parents affected the young prince. "If Leopold wanted to see his father, he had to apply for an audience". The cold atmosphere in which he grew up haunted him in later life. He became an "ungainly, haughty young man whom his first cousin Queen Elizabeth of England thought 'very odd' and in the habit of 'saying disagreeable things to people'," says Hochschild.

Like his parents, Leopold and his wife, Marie-Henriette "loathed each other at first sight, feelings that apparently never changed", Hochschild continues. "Like many young couples of the day, the newlyweds apparently found sex a frightening mystery." Queen Victoria became their sex-educator. She and her husband, Prince Albert, gave Leopold and his wife (visiting from Brussels) tips about how to consummate their marriage. Several years later, when Marie-Henriette became pregnant, Leopold wrote to Prince Albert thanking him for "the wise and practical advice you gave me...[It] has now borne fruit."

When Leopold finally ascended the throne in 1865, his undying desire was to own colonies. He tried everything under the sun to get a colony to no avail, including offering to buy the Philippines from Spain, buying lakes in the Nile and draining them out, or trying to lease territory on the island of Formosa.

He despised Belgium's small size. "Small country, small people" was how he described his little Belgium that had only become independent in 1830. The brutal expeditions of Stanley in Africa finally offered Leopold the chance to land his prized jewel, Congo.

Stanley had made two "journalistic" trips to Africa, first in 1869 to find David Livingstone. The second was in 1874 where, starting from Zanzibar with 356 people (mostly Africans), he "attacked and destroyed 28 large towns and three or four score villages" (his own words) as he plundered his way down to Boma and the mouth of the Congo River on the Atlantic coast.

In 1879, Stanley was off again to Africa, this time under commission from King Leopold to colonise Congo for him. Stanley used the gun, cheap European goods and plain-faced deceit to win over 450 local chiefs and their people and take over their land.

Stanley apparently remembered how the 22-sq-mile Manhattan Island in New York Bay had been "bought" from the Native Americans by the Dutch colonial officer, Peter Minuit, with trinkets valued at just $24.

If Minuit could do it in Manhattan, Stanley could do it, too, in the Congo. Only that in his case, he just asked the Congolese chiefs to mark Xs to legal documents written in a foreign language they had not seen before. Stanley called them treaties, like this one signed on 1 April 1884 by the chiefs of Ngombi and Mafela:

In return for "one piece of cloth per month to each of the undersigned chiefs, besides present of cloth in hand, they promised to freely of their own accord, for themselves and their heirs and successors for ever... give up to the said Association [set up by Leopold] the sovereignty and all sovereign and governing rights to all their territories... and to assist by labour or otherwise, any works, improvements or expeditions which the said Association shall cause at any time to be carried out in any part of these territories... All roads and waterways running through this country, the right of collecting tolls on the same, and all game, fishing, mining and forest rights, are to be the absolute property of the said Association."

With treaties like this, Stanley set forth to colonise Congo for Leopold. But the French would not let them have all the laugh. They sent Count Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza on their own colonising mission. De Brazza landed north of the Congo River, curved out an enclave for France and had a town named after him (Brazzaville). The enclave eventually became known as Congo Brazzaville, where the French too unleashed their own brutality on the local people.

Meanwhile Stanley was doing a "good" job across the river for Leopold, building a railway and a dirt road to skirt the 220-mile descent of the river. This was to facilitate the shipping of Congo's abundant ivory and other wealth to Belgium to enrich Leopold and his petit pays. In 1884, Stanley finally left for home in England, his work for Leopold done.

Leopold next sent in his hordes, including Leon Rom, to use absolute terror to rule the land and ship out the wealth.

It was the brutality of Leopold's agents that would catch the eye of the world and lead to his forced sale of Congo to the Belgian government in 1908.

Ivory had been the initial prized Congo export for Leopold. Then something happened by accident in far away Ireland that dramatically changed the fate of Leopold, his Congo and its people. John Dunlop, an Irish veterinary surgeon, was tinkering with his son's bicycle in Belfast and accidentally discovered how to make an inflatable rubber tire for the bike. He set up a tire company in 1890 named after himself, Dunlop, and a new major industry was up and running. Rubber became the new gold, and Leopold was soon laughing all the way to the bank.

The huge rainforest of Congo teemed with wild rubber, and Leopold pressed his agents for more of it. This is when the genocide reached its peak. Tapping wild rubber was a difficult affair, and Leopold's agents had to use brutal force to get the people of Congo to go into the forests and gather rubber for Leopold. Any Congolese man who resisted the order, saw his wife kidnapped and put in chains to force him to go and gather rubber. Or sometimes the wife was killed in revenge.

As more villages resisted the rubber order, Leopold's agents ordered the Force Publique army to raid the rebellious villages and kill the people. To make sure that the soldiers did not waste the bullets in hunting animals, their officers demanded to see the amputated right hand of every person they killed. As Hochschild puts it, "the standard proof was the right hand from a corpse. Or occasionally not from a corpse. 'Sometimes', said one officer to a missionary, 'soldiers shot a cartridge at an animal in hunting; they then cut off a hand from a living man'. In some military units, there was even a 'keeper of the hands', his job was the smoking [of them]."

Fortunately for the people, Edmund Dene Morel, a clerk of a Liverpool shipping line used by Leopold to ship out Congo's wealth, discovered on his several journeys to the Belgian port of Antwerp in the 1890s that while rubber and ivory were shipped from Congo to Antwerp, only guns and soldiers were going from Antwerp to Congo. This marked the beginning of his massive newspaper campaign to expose Leopold and his atrocities in the Congo.

Morel's campaign in Europe and America finally forced Britain to ask its consul in Congo, the Irish patriot Sir Roger Casement, to make an investigative trip all over Congo and report. Casement's findings were so damning that the Foreign Office in London was too embarrassed that it could not publish the original.

Casement's description of "sliced hands and penises was far more graphic and forceful than the British government had expected". When the Foreign Office finally published a sanitised version of his report, an angry Casement sent a stinking 18-page letter of protest to his superiors in the Foreign Office, threatening to resign. He called his superiors "a gang of stupidities" and "a wretched set of incompetent noodles."

In the end, the Belgian government was forced to step in and buy Congo from Leopold in 1908. Negotiations for the buy-out started in 1906. Leopold dragged his feet for two years, but finally, in March 1908, the deal was done.

"The Belgian government first of all agreed to assume [Congo's] 110 million francs worth of debt, much of them in the form of bond's Leopold had freely dispensed over the years to [his] favourites", says Hochschild. Nearly 32 million franc of the debt was owed to the Belgian government itself through loans it had given years earlier to Leopold.

The government also agreed to pay 45.5 million francs towards completing Leopold's then unfinished pet building projects. On top of all this, Leopold got another 50 million francs (to be paid in instalments) 'as a mark of gratitude for his great sacrifices made for the Congo.'

"Those funds were not expected to come from the Belgian taxpayer.", Hochschild writes. "They were to be extracted from the Congo itself."

He finishes his book on a very high note: Calling this bit The Great Forgetting, Hochschild writes:

"From the colonial era, the major legacy Europe left for Africa was not democracy as it is practised today in countries like England, France and Belgium; it was authoritarian rule and plunder. On the whole continent, perhaps no nation has had a harder time than the Congo in emerging from the shadow of its past.

"When independence came, the country fared badly... Some Africans were being trained for that distant day; but when pressure grew and independence came in 1960, in the entire territory there were fewer than 30 African university graduates. There were no Congolese army officers, engineers, agronomists or physicians. The colony's administration had made few other steps toward a Congo run by its own people; of some 5,000 management-level positions in the civil service, only three were filled by Africans."

Yet on the day of independence, King Baudouin, the then monarch of Belgium, had the gall to tell the Congolese in his speech in Kinshasa: "It is now up to you, gentlemen, to show that you are worthy of our confidence".

No cheek could be bigger! And you could well imagine how mad the Congolese nationalists like Patrice Lumumba were jumping.

Hochschild has written an excellent book. Africa owes him a huge debt of gratitude. New African highly recommends the book for compulsory reading in African schools and universities.

Copyright (c) IC Publications Limited 1999. All rights reserved.

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