Michael Burleigh

Tropical Frenzy

The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism

By

Faber & Faber 400pp £20 order from our bookshop

For successive generations of British people, German militarism was symbolised by the spiked Pickelhaube helmets of the Prussian ‘Hun’ and the coal-scuttle Stahlhelme which became general throughout the Weimar Reichswehr and Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Camel-dung brown shirts are not so salient in the sumptuary roll of terror. The Storm Section (or SA) acquired them as a job lot of army surplus: they had been destined for General von Lettow-Vorbeck’s troops in German East Africa, one of the colonies Germany forfeited under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter