(With deepest apologies for this long hiatus)
No.
WEBER'S GERMANY WILL RETURN
FEBRUARY 2017
Weber's Germany: The Veterinarian Totalitarian
- Thread starter Tom Colton
- Start date
(With deepest apologies for this long hiatus)
No.
WEBER'S GERMANY WILL RETURN
FEBRUARY 2017
"Get the bombers."
*Contemplates grimdarkness*(With deepest apologies for this long hiatus)
No.
WEBER'S GERMANY WILL RETURN
FEBRUARY 2017
@Tom Colton This might be digging a little deep, but how involved is Weber in the day-to-day runnings of the Third Reich? Is he like Hitler, a "lazy Dictator" who is only interested in foreign policy and the military, with the extremism being carried out by bureaucrats attempting to curry favor, or is he more like Stalin (deeply embedded in the bureaucracy and aware of every policy)?
Ephraim Ben Raphael
Banned
Just finished binge-reading this- it's really great. I look forward to the fall of Weber's Reich!
Thanks, everyone! 
No, the update won't be today, but I now have more time to do the finishing touches on this part, which I must admit - since it involves the Final Solution - has been very draining to write. It will be posted next week, though.
But I can answer some questions:
Feel free to ask any other questions you have at this stage!
No, the update won't be today, but I now have more time to do the finishing touches on this part, which I must admit - since it involves the Final Solution - has been very draining to write.
It will be posted next week, though.But I can answer some questions:
He'd be more of a micromanager, along the lines of Stalin. I can't imagine someone of his venally reptilian nature being otherwise.
Given that the intricacy of this Final Solution is about the same as that of OTL's Holocaust, I would imagine so. Certainly, there will be considerable debate as to what Weber and co.'s plans would have been if they hadn't bullied Togoland and Kamerun out of the Allies at Gutenberg.
Feel free to ask any other questions you have at this stage!
Artaxerxes
Banned
Very good, all caught up. Lot of butterflies and you've clearly thought beyond the "Germany would do the same thing and THIS ONE KOOKY THING DIFFERENT! But with a different leader" of some alternate histories.
Archibald
Banned
Oh putain... this
is worse than that...
Oh fuck, now just try to play the two together... push the cat song after 0:42 and they match (if only briefly)
(laughing so loud I can no longer breath)
Last edited:
More like "The Internet, brought to you by cat videos."
Thank you very much! It means a lot to me.
Update's tomorrow. Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.
Roses are red,
Trotsky's a Jew.
I hope Weber Returns,
Or I'll be disappointed with you.
Trotsky's a Jew.
I hope Weber Returns,
Or I'll be disappointed with you.
Great, now I have as little of a problem with Islamophobia as the Labour Party.
Great, now I have as little of a problem with Islamophobia as the Labour Party.
I'm not sure what Islam has to do with anything or why Labour would be particularly Islamophobic. I mean on this side of the pond the bigots and conservatives lump themselves together... not under the party of jackasses, unfortunately, that would be too convenient.
Oh, that's just a running joke concerning its actual problem with anti-Semitism; when they eventually convened an inquiry, the result was that there was no sign of Islamophobia or "other forms of racism", which is a weird result to get from said inquiry to say the least.
Update will be this evening, so enjoy that over wine at the candlelight dinner.
7.6 The Second Exodus
Recap concerning what exactly TTL's Final Solution entails.
As before, trigger warning for genocide subjugation, oppression, forced labour, mass murder and racial hatred. The attitudes of the Nazi perpetrators of these crimes do not resemble mine in any way, shape or form. Please scroll to the bottom if you find any of the content within this update to be disturbing or unappealing to read in detail.
In the discussion of the post-Barbarossa period we must again turn to the tragedy that was the restoration of German colonial rule in West Africa, namely Togoland and Kamerun. The Reich had been in control of these two former colonies ever since the end of the Spring War, and had wasted no time in enacting what it called the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”. The answer, as outlined in the previous section, manifested in Heydrich’s plan involving the systematic deportation of Jews, and Romani and Sinti Gypsies, along with other “undesirables” such as homosexuals, from Germany, Poland and Eastern Europe to Kamerun, whereupon they would be worked to extinction in a “concentration camp the size of a country”.
This was done first through deliberate and criminal neglect of their living conditions as they were overworked, paid in “German West-African Marks”, promissory notes useless outside of the colony, and abused by local Cameroonians organised into the Kameruner Sonderkommando (KSK), in essence a massive organised gang. When this methodology failed due to outbreaks of malaria and other transmitted diseases which began to spread to the KSK and the German colonial authorities, it was instead decided to sterilise them in the guise of vaccinating them against such virulent outbreaks. This period of serfdom or otherwise enforced labour for the Jews and other imprisoned labourers within Kamerun was just long enough for the effects of sterilisation to be demographically visible – that is to say, not nearly slow enough for the NSDAP architects of the Final Solution.
This was presenting a problem for the Reich colonial authorities, particularly during the post-Barbarossa consolidation given the increased numbers of Jews coming in from Eastern Europe. While there was a need for a labour force in the work camps, particularly in the rubber plantations, concerns were growing that if there was an overly large Jewish population in Kamerun the disgruntled labourers might coordinate among themselves and take up arms against the Reich colonial authorities.
Despite taking up precautionary measures such as restricting movement between the work towns and tyrannically monitoring all correspondence, these concerns would eventually be proven to be valid when the central Reich authority collapsed. In the meantime, Reinhard Heydrich, planner of the Final Solution during his time as deputy Abwehr chief and now the Governor-General of German West Africa instituted several changes aimed at eliminating such potential sources of trouble while steadily culling the indentured population, in a measure bearing the typically euphemistic name of “Population Planning” (Bevölkerungsplanung).
Figure 55: Reinhard Heydrich (right) as Governor-General of German West Africa, meeting with Horst Böhme (left) [2], overseer of the KSK and known as “the hand which held the Cameroonian whip.” Kamerun, 1943.
Work towns with “trouble” populations, usually identifiable by the number of summary public executions which the guards would give, came under close scrutiny, and at least two, Kumba and Foumbot, were totally massacred at nearby lakes and the work towns repopulated with new arrivals. It was at the Foumbot massacre that a sickening new method of murder was learned and adopted by the Reich colonial authorities. During the cleanup operations near Lake Monoun, a freak accident led to a sinkhole collapse, and to quote the statement of Amon Göth, a captain of the Kolpo and chief perpetrator of the Foumbot murders:
Göth’s recollection seems lucid enough, although it was inaccurate in one aspect; he had been asphyxiated not by a vortex, but a mixture of volcanic gases and carbon-dioxide in a natural phenomenon known as a Mazuku (“evil wind” in Swahili), where a pocket of such gases is set free by surface erosion or disruption. Lake Monoun, and the various other bodies of freshwater around were in fact volcanic lakes lying upon the Oku Volcanic Field, an area rich in volcanic soils and pockets of magma and volcanic gases below the surface. Consultation with the KSK and ethnographic records identified the entire area as similarly volatile, as it was known as both a place for ancestors, rituals and most importantly, death. [3]
When word of the incident reached Heydrich, he commissioned a geological team to study the phenomenon, leading to the above conclusions when they determined that the lake water was anomalously high in carbon-dioxide. In these respects, the development of the infamous “Death Zone” containing the “Lakes of Death” (officially known as the Monoun Nature Reserve) strangely paralleled another famous innovation of the NSDAP regime, the V-Bomb; the thermobaric principles upon which it operated were inspired by another common human disaster, namely firedamp explosions in coal mines.
It did not take long for the twisted mind of Heydrich to realise that the entire area was similarly volatile and could act as a massive death-trap for whoever was working in it. Even if Mazuku phenomena could not be reliably triggered, survivability was considerably lower around Lake Monoun than anywhere else accessible to the German colonial authorities. Drawing further inspiration from the forced labour of Chinese prisoners-of-war during the Second Sino-Japanese War and of Allied POWs in Southeast Asia, the “Monoun Wall” (Monoun-mauer) was born. The new population of the Foumbot work town was set to work on a massive stockade circumscribing the lakes at Foumbot and Lake Monoun to the north totalling about 20 kilometres in length, although an later annexe to the north extended the length of the fence and stockade by another 13 kilometres.
Figure 56: A modern photograph of a stockade comprising the “Monoun Wall”. [4]
Work assignment to constructing the perimeter fence for this alleged “Nature Reserve” was confined to work towns which had disciplinary issues, although rotation to Foumbot eventually become more and more regular, as the methodology for inducing deliberate death was further simplified. The Kolpo and KSK units assigned to the Foumbot work town, or rather death-camp, were trained extensively in Mazuku drills and given supplies of emergency oxygen if carbon-dioxide was to leach out of the water or the ground; the workers were, of course, not given any such training and were simply dumped into the lake and left to die, with whichever possessions they had stripped from them beforehand, if they were struck unconscious by asphyxiation. It was determined by the medical teams that these methods were considerably more humane – for the executors.
Although much of the Kolpo was comprised of die-hard NSDAP fanatics, and propaganda had taught them to treat the indentured workers as subhuman serfs, the act of killing them personally had begun to take tolls on their psychology. The methodology of asphyxiation and abandonment was hence deemed to mentally take responsibility away from the exact moment of death, and would eventually distance them from their victims even further as the methodology evolved.
When the first ring of the stockade was completed, with many unnecessary and deliberately engineered deaths – estimates range from the low thousands to tens of thousands, and remains and effects of murdered labourers are to this day still being trawled from the lakes – the second phase of the atrocities began, commonly known “death through exposure” (Vernichtung durch Aussetzung, “extermination through exposure”) [5], or simply “Aussetzung”, meaning both “exposure” and “abandonment”. Much like ritual infanticide in Ancient Rome, the victims would simply be “assigned” to work in the sham reserve and be left to die.
Figure 57: Jewish serf-labour on the shore of Lake Monoun, likely preceding a Mazuku incident. Circa 1943.
Understanding that news of the rapid depopulations and the apparent lack of returns from Foumbot was spreading rapidly already despite the authorities’ best efforts, another work town was set up there and given some excuses of tasks to do, mainly the extension of the stockade to the north. However, the vast majority of the arrivals were there essentially to be sentenced to death. To prevent knowledge of how to leave the area, the arrivals were kept on steady rotation, with pauses of months in between deportations; to prevent the irrevocable loss of tools and other equipment, the “orientations” were simply conducted around nightfall. During the Monoun zone’s busiest period, buses would inevitably arrive late in the day, and the workers rushed into leaving their valuables behind in their bunks and ordered to assemble in the parade square with their bare necessities for the “orientation” due to the lateness of the hour. Hans Peter Richter quotes his friend Friedrich Schneider in Heart of Evil:
All guards assigned to the stockade were given explicit instructions that the detainees were not to be permitted exit, with lethal force permitted and encouraged. Those who were able to overcome the stockade – no easy feat, given the extensive bank-and-ditch system on the inside, with the ditch designed to appear narrower than it actually was and condemning those who fell in to starvation [4] (although many would fell trees and branches to help overcome this) – would find few Cameroonians willing to help them, as escaped detainees were obviously externally distinct from the locals. Nonetheless, there were networks of kind souls who did try to help escapees, in what was known as the Cameroonian “Underground Railroad”.
Reich colonial authorities were not particularly concerned with escapees as guards on patrol were also given similar instructions, and the KSK took care of delivering terrible reprisals unto any local populations found harbouring “abandoned” or “stray” workers; on the most sickeningly pragmatic level, it just meant fewer mouths to feed. The only major concern was that they might escape westwards into Nigeria, which was still under British administration, and reveal the horrific extents of their treatment. To this end, another massive undertaking was made to bolster and strengthen the border with Nigeria, nominally to prevent an invasion but obviously for keeping them in.
The major problem with this engineering project was that by its nature it brought the population of serfs close to the border, and many would make attempts to breach the border even if they were unclear as to where exactly their path led. Reprisals for these were terrible, with family members given public executions for the “crimes” of aiding and abetting the escapes, being tried of course with no proof whatsoever. Nonetheless, many felt the rewards of freedom in Nigeria so far outweighed the risks, and many daring stories of escape originate from the construction of the Kamerun-Nigeria border. The most dramatic of these would be the Garoua Escape, best known as the epoch event of the “Second Exodus”, referring to the general pattern of escapes along the border.
Figure 58: Forced labour in Garoua, before 1945.
The genesis of the Garoua plot is unclear, but must have solidified some time before 1945. This escape was the largest and the most famous, but precipitated many other similar attempts. Entire accounts have been written by the survivors of the Garoua Escape, and it has also entered the public consciousness and popular culture to such a great extent that it shall suffice to summarise the events in their key details. The escape began with a mass revolt within the work town during the early hours of the morning of 2nd August 1945, where several hundred labourers – mostly men – overpowered the guards, providing a distraction for the remainder of the workers to escape through uncompleted sections of the border wall. [6] About 300 interned labourers were able to initially escape, but the Afrika Korps along with the KSK were quickly alerted to the situation and rapidly stormed the work town. Most of the escapees were either recaptured or shot whilst trying to escape, but about slightly less than a hundred were able to make their way to the border, where their number was thinned either by the actions of the Reich authorities and the Cameroonian paramilitary or the hostile environment, eventually resulting in only eighteen survivors crossing into Nigeria.
Figure 59: Garoua escapees in Yola, Nigeria. Late 1945. [1]
Despite Reich colonial attempts to suppress all news of the incident, news eventually began spreading that a group of forced labourers had conducted a successful uprising against their guards and some of them had even managed to escape. Although Heydrich immediately doubled the guards at the border towns and enforced even more indiscriminate punishments for disobedience, unruly and insurgent workers ensured that the great border fence was never completed even by the time of the collapse of the Reich, and the sporadic but increasingly frequent escapes led to this period of time coming to be known as the “Second Exodus”, referencing the Biblical events concerning the Jewish flight from Egyptian servitude.
Although the British authorities in Nigeria did not attempt to repatriate any of the escapees, no direct attention was taken to ensure their safe crossing due to the delicate diplomatic situation until the later escapes when Britain and the Reich were de facto if not de jure in a state of war. The picture drawn up by the escapees, who were comprised majorly by Jews, was recorded but not immediately made public knowledge. This tardiness of the Churchill government has been roundly criticised, with the merits of forsaking human compassion in favour of apparent political necessity debated again and again. Nonetheless, with the reopening of hostilities on the Eastern Front, anti-German sentiment was quickly in demand, and the terrible conditions of the German work towns were quickly disseminated, soon to be joined by accounts such as Heart of Evil. Despite all this, the scale of the Reich’s intentions was successfully suppressed until the post-war trials due to Lake Monoun’s distance from the Kamerun-Nigeria border and overall secrecy concerning the Mazuku massacres.
Figure 60: “Rejuvenation”, a sculpture commemorating the Second Exodus by Batia Lichansky. Be’er Yakov, Israel. [7]
It is impossible to know just how many Jews, Romani and Sinti Gypsies, among other undesirables, were killed by the Reich in Kamerun due to the strife concurrent with the collapse of Reich authority; the lowest estimates are still close to a sixth of the millions shipped in atrocious conditions and essentially worked to death or as near-death as Heydrich and his accomplices could manage. Even the names of those gave their lives at Garoua and inspired a generation of captives to flee from Kamerun are for the most part lost to history. To this day, the search by modern inhabitants of the Commonwealth of Israel (amongst the wider Jewish diaspora) still continues, with extant documents concerning the Final Solution made publicly available there and in the international settlement of Jerusalem. [8]
[0] OTL quote, modified. Ian Kershaw's parents were Joseph Kershaw and Alice Robinson in OTL; the name change is partly butterflies and partly me not wanting to get sued.
[1] All images of Holocaust survivors are real people who managed to outlast the Nazi industralised mass murder.
[2] A chief perpetrator of the Holocaust in OTL, responsible for the reprisals in Czechoslovakia and leader of Einsatzgruppe B.
[3] This is a real-life phenomenon, albeit not properly documented till 1984. Amon Göth might ring some bells.
[4] This is a real picture of the Dachau stockade; the description of the ditch matches the design at Dachau.
[5] OTL's "Extermination through Labour".
[6] This is loosely based off OTL's Treblinka and Sobibor uprisings.
[7] This is a real Holocaust memorial. Nezer-Sireni was named after a specific individual postwar in OTL; Be'er Yakov has been around since before the PoD.
[8] Have some foreshadowing concerning the postwar world.
Next update concerning V-bombs, Tabun and all that sort of fun stuff will hopefully be at the end of this month. Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.
As before, trigger warning for genocide subjugation, oppression, forced labour, mass murder and racial hatred. The attitudes of the Nazi perpetrators of these crimes do not resemble mine in any way, shape or form. Please scroll to the bottom if you find any of the content within this update to be disturbing or unappealing to read in detail.
===
THE SECOND EXODUS
“The road to Kamerun was built by hate, but paved with indifference.”
THE SECOND EXODUS
“The road to Kamerun was built by hate, but paved with indifference.”
Sir Joseph Robinson, Final Solution historian. [0]
Figure 54: A group of child escapees, survivors of the “Second Exodus”, in Nigeria, c.1946. [1]
In the discussion of the post-Barbarossa period we must again turn to the tragedy that was the restoration of German colonial rule in West Africa, namely Togoland and Kamerun. The Reich had been in control of these two former colonies ever since the end of the Spring War, and had wasted no time in enacting what it called the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”. The answer, as outlined in the previous section, manifested in Heydrich’s plan involving the systematic deportation of Jews, and Romani and Sinti Gypsies, along with other “undesirables” such as homosexuals, from Germany, Poland and Eastern Europe to Kamerun, whereupon they would be worked to extinction in a “concentration camp the size of a country”.
This was done first through deliberate and criminal neglect of their living conditions as they were overworked, paid in “German West-African Marks”, promissory notes useless outside of the colony, and abused by local Cameroonians organised into the Kameruner Sonderkommando (KSK), in essence a massive organised gang. When this methodology failed due to outbreaks of malaria and other transmitted diseases which began to spread to the KSK and the German colonial authorities, it was instead decided to sterilise them in the guise of vaccinating them against such virulent outbreaks. This period of serfdom or otherwise enforced labour for the Jews and other imprisoned labourers within Kamerun was just long enough for the effects of sterilisation to be demographically visible – that is to say, not nearly slow enough for the NSDAP architects of the Final Solution.
This was presenting a problem for the Reich colonial authorities, particularly during the post-Barbarossa consolidation given the increased numbers of Jews coming in from Eastern Europe. While there was a need for a labour force in the work camps, particularly in the rubber plantations, concerns were growing that if there was an overly large Jewish population in Kamerun the disgruntled labourers might coordinate among themselves and take up arms against the Reich colonial authorities.
Despite taking up precautionary measures such as restricting movement between the work towns and tyrannically monitoring all correspondence, these concerns would eventually be proven to be valid when the central Reich authority collapsed. In the meantime, Reinhard Heydrich, planner of the Final Solution during his time as deputy Abwehr chief and now the Governor-General of German West Africa instituted several changes aimed at eliminating such potential sources of trouble while steadily culling the indentured population, in a measure bearing the typically euphemistic name of “Population Planning” (Bevölkerungsplanung).
Figure 55: Reinhard Heydrich (right) as Governor-General of German West Africa, meeting with Horst Böhme (left) [2], overseer of the KSK and known as “the hand which held the Cameroonian whip.” Kamerun, 1943.
Work towns with “trouble” populations, usually identifiable by the number of summary public executions which the guards would give, came under close scrutiny, and at least two, Kumba and Foumbot, were totally massacred at nearby lakes and the work towns repopulated with new arrivals. It was at the Foumbot massacre that a sickening new method of murder was learned and adopted by the Reich colonial authorities. During the cleanup operations near Lake Monoun, a freak accident led to a sinkhole collapse, and to quote the statement of Amon Göth, a captain of the Kolpo and chief perpetrator of the Foumbot murders:
“A plume of white gas and mist with no odour or taste suddenly shot up into the air, and washed over us as we were carrying the bodies to the pit which we had dug near the lake. We fell as though dead, because the air had been sucked out of our lungs, and I found myself gasping for breath, and fell unconscious shortly thereafter. I awoke in a hospital and was told that I had been suddenly asphyxiated, but had just recovered.”
Göth’s recollection seems lucid enough, although it was inaccurate in one aspect; he had been asphyxiated not by a vortex, but a mixture of volcanic gases and carbon-dioxide in a natural phenomenon known as a Mazuku (“evil wind” in Swahili), where a pocket of such gases is set free by surface erosion or disruption. Lake Monoun, and the various other bodies of freshwater around were in fact volcanic lakes lying upon the Oku Volcanic Field, an area rich in volcanic soils and pockets of magma and volcanic gases below the surface. Consultation with the KSK and ethnographic records identified the entire area as similarly volatile, as it was known as both a place for ancestors, rituals and most importantly, death. [3]
When word of the incident reached Heydrich, he commissioned a geological team to study the phenomenon, leading to the above conclusions when they determined that the lake water was anomalously high in carbon-dioxide. In these respects, the development of the infamous “Death Zone” containing the “Lakes of Death” (officially known as the Monoun Nature Reserve) strangely paralleled another famous innovation of the NSDAP regime, the V-Bomb; the thermobaric principles upon which it operated were inspired by another common human disaster, namely firedamp explosions in coal mines.
It did not take long for the twisted mind of Heydrich to realise that the entire area was similarly volatile and could act as a massive death-trap for whoever was working in it. Even if Mazuku phenomena could not be reliably triggered, survivability was considerably lower around Lake Monoun than anywhere else accessible to the German colonial authorities. Drawing further inspiration from the forced labour of Chinese prisoners-of-war during the Second Sino-Japanese War and of Allied POWs in Southeast Asia, the “Monoun Wall” (Monoun-mauer) was born. The new population of the Foumbot work town was set to work on a massive stockade circumscribing the lakes at Foumbot and Lake Monoun to the north totalling about 20 kilometres in length, although an later annexe to the north extended the length of the fence and stockade by another 13 kilometres.
Figure 56: A modern photograph of a stockade comprising the “Monoun Wall”. [4]
Work assignment to constructing the perimeter fence for this alleged “Nature Reserve” was confined to work towns which had disciplinary issues, although rotation to Foumbot eventually become more and more regular, as the methodology for inducing deliberate death was further simplified. The Kolpo and KSK units assigned to the Foumbot work town, or rather death-camp, were trained extensively in Mazuku drills and given supplies of emergency oxygen if carbon-dioxide was to leach out of the water or the ground; the workers were, of course, not given any such training and were simply dumped into the lake and left to die, with whichever possessions they had stripped from them beforehand, if they were struck unconscious by asphyxiation. It was determined by the medical teams that these methods were considerably more humane – for the executors.
Although much of the Kolpo was comprised of die-hard NSDAP fanatics, and propaganda had taught them to treat the indentured workers as subhuman serfs, the act of killing them personally had begun to take tolls on their psychology. The methodology of asphyxiation and abandonment was hence deemed to mentally take responsibility away from the exact moment of death, and would eventually distance them from their victims even further as the methodology evolved.
When the first ring of the stockade was completed, with many unnecessary and deliberately engineered deaths – estimates range from the low thousands to tens of thousands, and remains and effects of murdered labourers are to this day still being trawled from the lakes – the second phase of the atrocities began, commonly known “death through exposure” (Vernichtung durch Aussetzung, “extermination through exposure”) [5], or simply “Aussetzung”, meaning both “exposure” and “abandonment”. Much like ritual infanticide in Ancient Rome, the victims would simply be “assigned” to work in the sham reserve and be left to die.
Figure 57: Jewish serf-labour on the shore of Lake Monoun, likely preceding a Mazuku incident. Circa 1943.
Understanding that news of the rapid depopulations and the apparent lack of returns from Foumbot was spreading rapidly already despite the authorities’ best efforts, another work town was set up there and given some excuses of tasks to do, mainly the extension of the stockade to the north. However, the vast majority of the arrivals were there essentially to be sentenced to death. To prevent knowledge of how to leave the area, the arrivals were kept on steady rotation, with pauses of months in between deportations; to prevent the irrevocable loss of tools and other equipment, the “orientations” were simply conducted around nightfall. During the Monoun zone’s busiest period, buses would inevitably arrive late in the day, and the workers rushed into leaving their valuables behind in their bunks and ordered to assemble in the parade square with their bare necessities for the “orientation” due to the lateness of the hour. Hans Peter Richter quotes his friend Friedrich Schneider in Heart of Evil:
“My first impression was that for a town with so many workers, there were so few tools.”
All guards assigned to the stockade were given explicit instructions that the detainees were not to be permitted exit, with lethal force permitted and encouraged. Those who were able to overcome the stockade – no easy feat, given the extensive bank-and-ditch system on the inside, with the ditch designed to appear narrower than it actually was and condemning those who fell in to starvation [4] (although many would fell trees and branches to help overcome this) – would find few Cameroonians willing to help them, as escaped detainees were obviously externally distinct from the locals. Nonetheless, there were networks of kind souls who did try to help escapees, in what was known as the Cameroonian “Underground Railroad”.
Reich colonial authorities were not particularly concerned with escapees as guards on patrol were also given similar instructions, and the KSK took care of delivering terrible reprisals unto any local populations found harbouring “abandoned” or “stray” workers; on the most sickeningly pragmatic level, it just meant fewer mouths to feed. The only major concern was that they might escape westwards into Nigeria, which was still under British administration, and reveal the horrific extents of their treatment. To this end, another massive undertaking was made to bolster and strengthen the border with Nigeria, nominally to prevent an invasion but obviously for keeping them in.
The major problem with this engineering project was that by its nature it brought the population of serfs close to the border, and many would make attempts to breach the border even if they were unclear as to where exactly their path led. Reprisals for these were terrible, with family members given public executions for the “crimes” of aiding and abetting the escapes, being tried of course with no proof whatsoever. Nonetheless, many felt the rewards of freedom in Nigeria so far outweighed the risks, and many daring stories of escape originate from the construction of the Kamerun-Nigeria border. The most dramatic of these would be the Garoua Escape, best known as the epoch event of the “Second Exodus”, referring to the general pattern of escapes along the border.
Figure 58: Forced labour in Garoua, before 1945.
The genesis of the Garoua plot is unclear, but must have solidified some time before 1945. This escape was the largest and the most famous, but precipitated many other similar attempts. Entire accounts have been written by the survivors of the Garoua Escape, and it has also entered the public consciousness and popular culture to such a great extent that it shall suffice to summarise the events in their key details. The escape began with a mass revolt within the work town during the early hours of the morning of 2nd August 1945, where several hundred labourers – mostly men – overpowered the guards, providing a distraction for the remainder of the workers to escape through uncompleted sections of the border wall. [6] About 300 interned labourers were able to initially escape, but the Afrika Korps along with the KSK were quickly alerted to the situation and rapidly stormed the work town. Most of the escapees were either recaptured or shot whilst trying to escape, but about slightly less than a hundred were able to make their way to the border, where their number was thinned either by the actions of the Reich authorities and the Cameroonian paramilitary or the hostile environment, eventually resulting in only eighteen survivors crossing into Nigeria.
Figure 59: Garoua escapees in Yola, Nigeria. Late 1945. [1]
Although the British authorities in Nigeria did not attempt to repatriate any of the escapees, no direct attention was taken to ensure their safe crossing due to the delicate diplomatic situation until the later escapes when Britain and the Reich were de facto if not de jure in a state of war. The picture drawn up by the escapees, who were comprised majorly by Jews, was recorded but not immediately made public knowledge. This tardiness of the Churchill government has been roundly criticised, with the merits of forsaking human compassion in favour of apparent political necessity debated again and again. Nonetheless, with the reopening of hostilities on the Eastern Front, anti-German sentiment was quickly in demand, and the terrible conditions of the German work towns were quickly disseminated, soon to be joined by accounts such as Heart of Evil. Despite all this, the scale of the Reich’s intentions was successfully suppressed until the post-war trials due to Lake Monoun’s distance from the Kamerun-Nigeria border and overall secrecy concerning the Mazuku massacres.
Figure 60: “Rejuvenation”, a sculpture commemorating the Second Exodus by Batia Lichansky. Be’er Yakov, Israel. [7]
It is impossible to know just how many Jews, Romani and Sinti Gypsies, among other undesirables, were killed by the Reich in Kamerun due to the strife concurrent with the collapse of Reich authority; the lowest estimates are still close to a sixth of the millions shipped in atrocious conditions and essentially worked to death or as near-death as Heydrich and his accomplices could manage. Even the names of those gave their lives at Garoua and inspired a generation of captives to flee from Kamerun are for the most part lost to history. To this day, the search by modern inhabitants of the Commonwealth of Israel (amongst the wider Jewish diaspora) still continues, with extant documents concerning the Final Solution made publicly available there and in the international settlement of Jerusalem. [8]
[0] OTL quote, modified. Ian Kershaw's parents were Joseph Kershaw and Alice Robinson in OTL; the name change is partly butterflies and partly me not wanting to get sued.
[1] All images of Holocaust survivors are real people who managed to outlast the Nazi industralised mass murder.
[2] A chief perpetrator of the Holocaust in OTL, responsible for the reprisals in Czechoslovakia and leader of Einsatzgruppe B.
[3] This is a real-life phenomenon, albeit not properly documented till 1984. Amon Göth might ring some bells.
[4] This is a real picture of the Dachau stockade; the description of the ditch matches the design at Dachau.
[5] OTL's "Extermination through Labour".
[6] This is loosely based off OTL's Treblinka and Sobibor uprisings.
[7] This is a real Holocaust memorial. Nezer-Sireni was named after a specific individual postwar in OTL; Be'er Yakov has been around since before the PoD.
[8] Have some foreshadowing concerning the postwar world.
===
SUMMARY: Heydrich weaponises natural phenomena to essentially play The Most Dangerous Game in Cameroon, but sporadic escapees give hope to the indentured serfs within, and it doesn't all come crashing down until the end of the Reich.
Next update concerning V-bombs, Tabun and all that sort of fun stuff will hopefully be at the end of this month. Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.
stirlingdraka
Donor
Another well done update on the evil of TTLs Final Solution. At least the Garoua Escape was a small successful escape attempt.