There we have it, a mixture of laconic openness and preventive propaganda. There are enough reports to show that the lot of the natives did not improve in any way after the war. The unbridled opportunism that Smuts and Botha had displayed, spread to his troops here and there at the beginning of the campaign.
“In the case of the Union troops, the food supply was apparently quite scarce at times. The disappointment with the progress of the campaign probably also contributed, and the enemy changed his behaviour. So it came about that during this time all belongings and livestock were plundered on numerous farms.”
This confirms the old wisdom: There is a villain in every one of us, you just have to let him off the leash.
Fortunately not to the extent that it happened 30 years later in Germany, when various murderous and raping multicultural hordes descended on the eastern parts of Germany in particular. Anyone who is interested in that subject and has strong nerves should read the book “Ostpreussisches Tagebuch” by Hans Graf von Lehndorff. In contrast, Elena Scrjabin described in “Leningrad Diary” how a Russian woman fared under German occupation and as a slave laborer. A situation into which she voluntarily entered herself with a sick son in tow, on the run from the Bolsheviks. If you have nerves like steel ropes and want to know more about the atrocities instigated by Ilja Ehrenburg in eastern Germany, you may read in detail in the book “Die Flüchtlinge” by Günter Böddeker. The two Russian officers, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Lev Kopelew, who reported with concern on the activities of their troops, were then allowed to spend several years in the Soviet Gulag because they had practiced “bourgeois humanism”. The communist hordes these days (Red Army Faction, Antifa, BLM, etc.) are again using humanism as a cover for intolerance and totalitarian thinking.
Margarethe von Eckenbrecher reported on a hateful war psychosis that had spread among the nurses who had come with Botha’s troops. Some of them refused to take care of the wounded German soldiers and left this task to the civilian women in Windhoek.
She also reports of the dismantling and removal of property (wooden bridge piles of the Swakopmund landing jetty, even the bronze horse rider monument was targeted – luckily the attempt was foiled). Bargain hunters flocked to Windhoek to obtain valuables on the cheap. Most of the German troops, police and officials were expelled in a rigorous manner that even caused a stir in the Union parliament. Some “useful” people, surveyors and teachers were allowed to stay. The “undesirables”, the poor or people who had no access to their financial resources in their homeland, were forbidden from receiving any help. In return, many officials, business people, Jewish traders, speculators and lawyers (their number swelled from 2 to over 30 lawyers; Yiddish was temporarily allowed on some official documents) and “poor whites” from the Union streamed in. Day after day, people, impoverished since the Anglo Boer War, were carted in by train. Even Angola Boers who had lived there since 1876 were settled in so-called Angola blocs. In order to make room for these new settlers, the new masters were not squeamish in their methods. Many German farmers were driven to suicide or were unable to keep their indebted farms – numerous foreclosures were the result. The long-term sustainability regulation of the German administration, according to which between every 3 farms, one farm was not sold as a reserve farm in order to serve as emergency pasture in drought years, was thrown overboard. These farms were handed over to the new settlers and Union soldiers under favourable conditions.
When the economy in the country recovered several years later, it was claimed that the products from the north threatened the South African economy. Protective tariffs were raised to avert the “threat”.
To make matters worse, the Spanish flu broke out in Windhoek in 1918. Having arrived from the Union with a circus, adding to the burdens of Typhoid, Malta fever, Malaria and other imported diseases. According to the reports, this flu wave was far more aggressive than the Corona outbreak of 2019, which has been promoted as a pandemic that would last for many years. In Windhoek, the flu claimed many victims in combination with the prevailing chaotic conditions, but only lasted a few weeks. It ravaged a few more weeks on various farms.