Reparations and reconciliation: negotiating claims of historical injustice in the case of the herero genocide

To date, Germany has denied any obligation to financial compensation for the Herero genocide of 1904-1907. The Herero began petitioning in 1995 and haven’t yet seen results. The reconciliation process has been slowed by German denial and Namibian politics alike. Germany maintains that genocide was not technically illegal until the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, an argument that contradicts the hundreds of millions of dollars they continue to pay to Jewish victims as restitution for WWII. Historians argue that there are extensive links between German colonialism and the Jewish Holocaust. German concentration camps in Namibia developed extermination techniques that later enabled Jewish Holocaust, and both used the victims’ bodies for scientific research. In 2012, a delegation of Namibians retrieved 20 skulls of Herero and Nama victims from Germany. The repatriation of the skulls stimulated a resurgence of debate about reparations, motivating the Left Party to make a motion in German parliament that outlines an apology, repatriation, reparations, and continued partnership between the two nations.