Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck

but he's from Texas

Bump

His exploits in east africa could be said to have been harmful to the native population, but he didn't do it out of a sense that the people living there were inferior, so calling him a racist for it is kind of dumb. Also the anti-semitism thing seems like bullshit considering he wanted nothing to do with the nazis and ended up regretting his campaign in east africa in his later years.
Haters gonna hate.

>

Didn't the Germans genocided the Herero because they attacked the farms and industrial buildings?

Well, yeah, but not under vorbeck's orders.

They did revolt, which is a pretty natural response to having your land, property, livelihood and freedom taken from you.

>Anglos calling anyone racist
>Anglos calling anyone exploitative
>Anglos calling anyone evil
>Anglos moralizing about other people to begin with
I can never get enough laughs out of this

Vorbeck didn’t participate in it and disproved of Trotha’s ordering of it

Most criticism of Vorbeck centers around the fact that he single-handedly brought the Great War to Africa, despite the fact that the various colonial powers had a pre-existing agreement that colonies would stay neutral in the event of a continental war. The governor of German East Africa, Heinrich Schnee, wanted to the colony to simply declare neutrality and sit on the sidelines during the Great War, and most of the colony's inhabitants (this includes white settlers as well as blacks) were in agreement with him.

However, Vorbeck utterly refused to listen to Schnee, arguing that the colony had a duty to fight for the Fatherland no matter the consequences. As somebody who'd been trained for war since he was 15 years old, Vorbeck had no intention of sitting on the sidelines during the showdown of the century. He started launching raids against British colonies despite Schnee's protests. In particular, Vorbeck was most interested in attacking British railroads in Africa.

Vorbeck was in charge of the colony's Schutztruppe (protection force). This was a small army of mostly black soldiers who'd sworn allegiance to the Kaiser, and were tasked mostly with putting down colonial revolts. They were armed mostly with outdated, single-shot rifles leftover from the Franco-Prussian war, supplemented by modern (at the time) machine guns. But Vorbeck ordered them to fight, and so they did. Vorbeck's life is honestly very fascinating, but the criticisms of him, that he brought the war into Africa when it didn't really need to happen, aren't entirely wrong.

Do you think German conlonisation was better in comparison to Britain for example?

Good post, thanks.

It really depends on what decade you're talking about. The German colonies were initially quite brutal, differing very little from being very large slave plantations. But after the Herero wars, the Social Democrats won an election and then made very serious efforts at reform, and the situation changed drastically almost overnight. They banned forced labor in the colonies and introduced things like free education and healthcare paid for by the German government. In a very short period of time, German colonization became arguably the most humane of any colonial power.

>single handedly brought the great war to africa
German South-West africa resisted too, you know (although that campaign was much shorter).

Was it not the British who truly violated the neutrality in GEA by invading Tanga? Yes Vorbeck ignored Schnee’s call for neutrality and prepared for an assault but he didn’t start one.

The brits started shit in german south west africa too.

Heinreich Schnee was a fucking dickhead though, a cruiser came in and shelled Dar Es Salaam because of Konigsbergs commerce raiding before Lettow-Vorbeck even had the chance to start organizing anything

I don't totally agree with the criticism, I was just outlining the basic logic of it. In my mind, the British and French were using soldiers from all their colonies on all fronts of the war, so the idea that the colonies could ever be considered neutral territory is a bit of a farce in itself. The British, in particular, made extensive use of their Indian subjects in every theater. The French even brought black soldiers from their African colonies to the western front.

Ironic, I've read the French colonial troops were stationed in Paris and had relationships with the women.

How is that ironic?

The intention of the colonial troops was to send them into the fight

indiana joines

ion one of the moves, I think the one where he was in WWI, they comment he was a monster and responsible for th edeaths of thousands

Ironic means something unexpected. Soldiers getting with local women, consensually or otherwise, isn't unexpected. It happens literally everywhere soldiers are stationed.

>movies
you're thinking of that awful "the young indiana jones" TV show

Uh...
No, I was referring to this
youtu.be/irdOYTZj5b4

that's not a clip from an indiana jones movie

>War ends
>Goes back to Germany
>Hmmm.....what do I do now?
>Remembers a girl he met once on a boat 12 years ago
>Invites her over to his house
>Surprise its actually a wedding
>Marries her that night
Truly the most interesting man in the world.

Christ that show was beyond shitty and one of the reasons why I ended up hating Hollywood.
>introduction of [insert obscure European figure from before the 1930s] and explanation why he was horrible and racist
>the rest of the episode is motorcycle chases and circus acrobatics

There is nothing wrong with being racist and antisemite.

the issue here is that he was neither

Just shows that it's the blacks, and not the Jews are the ultimate sacred cow in the west. Stauffenberg who was just as anti-semitic as Hitler is viewed as a hero, but people like Lettow are viewed as evil just because they killed some blacks in Africa

hen Hitler offered him the ambassadorship to the Court of St. James’s in 1935, he “told Hitler to go fuck himself.” Although repeatedly harassed by the Nazis, he survived their regime due to his popularity as a genuine hero of the old school.

I would argue that anti semitic jokes are more accepted in America than anti black jokes because antisemitism was basically nonexistent here until 2016

Lettow isn't seen as evil, you nincompoop.

And considering he was shockingly eglitarian towards his black troops, you probably wouldn't like him that much.

>Stauffenberg who was just as anti-semitic as Hitler

>became lifelong friends with the British commanders after the war
>returned to Tanzania after the war and partied with the locals, who made him an honorary prince
>demanded that the government give pensions to the Askaris- the only country in the war to offer to colonial troops

Sure, he was tough. He used scorched earth on his own protectorates. But that was nothing compared to what the British and Belgians were doing to their troops. He had captured Allied askaris defect and fight for him, if that tells you something