The War Raw Materials Department under Walther Rathenau

At Hedemannstraße 12 in Berlin-Kreuzberg, a memorial plaque in front of the former headquarters of the War Raw Materials Department from the First World War commemorates its founder Walter Rathenau. Rathenau was a well-known personality of the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. He played a leading role in the electrical company AEG, founded by his father; he was a liberal politician, German Foreign Minister and at the same time made a name for himself with his extensive journalistic activities. In 1922, he fell victim to an anti-Semitic attack carried out by the right-wing extremist "Organisation Consul". The commemorative plaque was removed by the National Socialists in 1933; in 1989, a Berlin plaque was unveiled at the same location in memory of Walther Rathenau.

The fact that Walter Rathenau was actively involved in German colonial policy in the early 20th century has been little known until now. Rathenau wrote reports on the overseas colonies and was a significant advocate of the expansionist idea of Central Europe before and during the First World War.

As an entrepreneur and member of the Berlin Trading Company, Rathenau was anxious to assess the economic potential of the German colonies. His relationship to colonialism in Africa stemmed primarily from his acquaintance with Bernhard Dernburg. The latter originally came from the private sector and became State Secretary and thus head of the Reich Colonial Office in 1907. Dernburg grew up as a Protestant, but was still perceived as a Jew due to his origins. His nomination for such a high office appeared to be a significant step for the Jewish community, and Rathenau also saw his appointment as a support for his own political ambitions. Dernburg and Rathenau met shortly before the former became Deputy Director of the Colonial Department at the Foreign Office in 1906. The obvious sympathy between the two led Dernburg to invite Rathenau to participate in his trips to Africa as an unofficial advisor. [1] In July 1907, the delegation, accompanied by representatives of the press, first set off for Mombasa.

It was only the second time that a colonial secretary had left the metropolis to visit the so-called protected areas. [2] The trip and also the accompaniment by the press showed the growing importance of colonial affairs in domestic politics. The topic had previously caused controversy. Almost a year before the trip, the government had applied for a supplementary budget in view of the uprisings of the Ovaherero and Nama in the colony of German Southwest (DSW) – about 30 million marks of state expenditure were to flow into the pacification of the colony. The amendment was rejected – Social Democrats and members of parliament from the Catholic Centre in particular criticised the genocidal warfare. At the same time, the fighting in German East Africa (DOA) was also increasingly in the headlines – the so-called Majimaji[3] movement was fought with extermination measures. At the end of 1906, the Kaiser dissolved parliament; the following elections were so strongly influenced by colonial policy that the press referred to them as the "elections", with the racist term for the Nama, which was already a racist term at the time. [4]

In view of the scandals and uprisings, Dernburg was to initiate a reformist turn in colonial policy. [5] In Rathenau, he had an independent advisor who was particularly familiar with economic issues. Rathenau took part in the trip at his own expense; he also wrote his later reports without any payment, as was customary at the time. The group first traveled to Mombasa and Zanzibar before landing in DOA, where they visited Dar es Salaam, Tanga, Kilimanjaro, Lake Nyanza (Lake Victoria), Tabora, and Mwanza. As with any colonial expedition, they were escorted by members of the colonial troops and about 300 porters. [6] Rathenau's diary shows that he had little sympathy with the habitus of the local whites. Immediately after landing in Dar es Salaam in August 1907, he wrote critically of "mediocre whites who see in superiority and proskynesis not responsibility but satisfaction of the feeling of tyranny". [7]

However, Rathenau's East Africa diary was based on typical colonial travelogues of the time: romantic descriptions of flora and fauna stood alongside an exoticizing and objectifying ethnography of the local population. His observations fluctuated between fascination and racist contempt. In his opinion, East African communities were "without tradition and history"[8], although he concealed the influence of the violent European land grab. In October 1907, Rathenau returned to Germany.

When the budget of the colonial department for the following year was approved by the Reichstag, Dernburg and Rathenau set off on their second trip, this time to southern Africa. Between May and August 1908, they travelled in the Cape Colony, from Cape Town along the coast to Durban, then to Johannesburg, Pretoria and Kimberley. In Pretoria, they met with prominent white South African politicians, including Prime Minister Louis Botha and his successor Jan Smuts. Smuts later became an ardent supporter of "race" segregation and was instrumental in the implementation of apartheid. They then took the train north to Bulawayo (Zimbabwe), Livingstone (Zambia) before ending their journey in DSW. In the German settler colony, Rathenau witnessed the official opening of the newly expanded Lüderitz-Keetmanshoop railway line, a line that had also been built under inhumane conditions by forced labor of Herero and Nama prisoners. [9] Dernburg and Rathenau paid numerous polite visits to members of the colonial military, many of whom were responsible for genocidal violence on the ground.

Rathenau and Dernburg also visited several mining mines in southern Africa. The question of the extraction, transport and export of diamonds (in Premier and near Lüderitz), copper (in Areacha), marble (in Karibib), asbestos (in Koegas) and other minerals (in Tsumeb) seemed to be at the top of their agenda. Rathenau hoped that the colonies could become profitable by investing in the extraction of raw materials, especially minerals. [10] Although his diary entries from this trip are significantly shorter than those from East Africa and thus offer little of his personal impressions of the country, its people and colonial administration, they testify to the fact that he apparently perceived the inhumane enforcement of "racial" segregation, the everyday violence against the local population and the use of genocidal methods. [11]

In mid-November 1907, Dernburg had sent Rathenau's first report to Reich Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow, who was very impressed by it and also by Rathenau himself. The second, much more critical report on Südwest, on the other hand, met with little approval – Dernburg saw it as interference. A planned award of the order to Rathenau was repeatedly postponed, and he found himself temporarily sidelined politically. [12] In his report, Rathenau condemned the military measures, described the behavior of the military as "humiliating" and bordering on "slavery". [13] He criticized the internment in camps, the massacres and the "extermination order" proclaimed by General von Trotha against the Herero in 1904. [14] He considered the Battle of the Waterberg against the Ovaherero and the subsequent displacement of the population into the desert to be "the greatest atrocity ever caused by German weapons policy: namely, which languished an entire nation with its wife and child in weeks of agony". [15] He even described the war waged by the Ovaherero and Nama as "legitimate", since the resistance had arisen due to a colonial policy that had robbed the local population of their livelihoods, including land and livestock. [16] The report was withheld and not published until several years after his death, in 1928, in the "Nachgelassene Schriften".

But this criticism should not obscure the fact that Rathenau's interventions – in line with those of Dernburg – were aimed at reforming the colonies, not at abolishing them. He did not question the basic principles of colonialism. As an admirer of the Empire, he often cited the British as a role model, and the second trip of the Dernburg delegation also led to London for consultations with colonial officials there. Rathenau praised British foreign policy as a source of economic profit[17] and contrasted it with the poor planning and "hopeless" tyranny in the German colonies that he observed. [18] He considered the local population to be incapable of conducting their own economy, agriculture and land policy and considered it necessary for the Europeans to "illuminate" it. [19] In doing so, he seemed to be well aware of the plight and demands of African leaders[20] and called for regulations to limit the excessive use of force. [21] For East Africa, however, Rathenau did not call for an end to land grabbing, only milder methods. He wanted to end forced labor there, but as a result it was to be replaced by the exploitation of "free" labor on site. [22] These changes were intended to serve the profitability of the colonies, the trade in agricultural products, rubber or minerals. For South West Africa, Rathenau advocated "race" segregation through the creation of reserves for indigenous ethnic groups – based on the British-South African model. [23]

Rathenau continued his political career despite anti-Semitic hostility and an aversion to party politics. [24] At the outbreak of the First World War, he offered his technical know-how to the German War Ministry. He was appointed to direct the supply of raw materials for the war and founded the War Raw Materials Department (KRA), whose headquarters occupied the entire street front of Hedemannstraße in Berlin-Kreuzberg. [25] Since the British naval blockade prevented the procurement of foreign raw materials, the KRA was to monitor and distribute the processing of the available raw materials. As director of the KRA, Rathenau consistently advocated the forcible confiscation of raw materials from the territories occupied by Germany in Europe. Already at the beginning of the war, he wrote a memorandum in which he reformulated his earlier thoughts on a German-dominated "Central Europe". Only the customs union with Austria-Hungary – brought about militarily if necessary – could establish the German Reich as a world power alongside France, Great Britain and Russia. [26] Rathenau saw the war as an opportunity to realize this concept. His proposals undoubtedly played a role in the formulation of the expansionist "September Program" of the government of Reich Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, which envisaged not only a German-dominated, economically united Europe, but also an expansion of German colonial possessions into a territorially continuous "Central Africa".

It is clear that Rathenau always represented the perspective of the German Reich, which also meant: a perspective of European superiority overseas, a perspective of world power and leadership in Europe itself. It is astonishing that Rathenau was always confronted with anti-Semitism and also addressed it, for example when he characterized himself as a "second-class citizen",[27] but at no time transferred these experiences of discrimination to the situation of the population in the colonies – the belief in European superiority never left him. He saw a parallel to the situation of Jews in Europe only in the situation of the local merchants of Indian origin, who were hostile to the black population. [28] However, Rathenau undoubtedly denounced the genocidal practices, especially with regard to the southwest, and also accepted personal costs in the conflict with the government and colonial administration.