The town where Germany did not lose World War I

Press, 27 November 1986, Page 12

The town where Germany did not lose World War I

By

ARIK BACHAR

I of Reuters in Swakopmund, Namibia

The isolated town of Swakopmund in Namibia (South-West Africa) gives visitors an urge to glance at their watches and make sure they are in the right decade.

Wedged between the huge sand dunes of the Namib Desert and the Atlantic coast of southern Africa, Swakopmund is slowly putting modern make-up on the German colonial face left behind by Kaiser Wilhelm’s defeated troops in 1917.

“This is one of the most German towns outside Germany,” said Mr Jorg Henrichsen, mayor of the town of 18,000, many of them settlers from postwar Germany or descendants of colonists. Established in 1892, the town offers unlikely scenes on the edge of one of the world’s most forbidding deserts, with men in immaculately pressed suits being served drinks by Africans who speak fluent German.

The colonial architecture which still dominates the town, tourist centre of South Africancontrolled Namibia, makes it possibly one of the best preserved relics of the time when Germany sought a foothold in Africa in competition with Britain and France.

Foreigners lured to the town in recent years by a nearby uranium mine say isolation from Germany has created a particularly conservative breed of Germans.

"Some of them still don’t quite agree they have lost the World War — World War I, that is,” said a British expatriate who has lived in Swakopmund for seven years.

It took the discovery of huge uranium deposits at the Rossing mine in the 1970 s to start diluting the German character of Swakopmund with the arrival of hundreds of British and South African mining experts. They found a society which included reclusive refugees from World War I, “not so much the Nazi type but the officer and gentleman U-boat commander kind,” said the British expatriate who asked not to be identified.

Mr Henrichsen, a third-genera-tion Swakopmunder whose grandfather set up one of the first businesses in the Kaiser’s outpost, said support for Nazi Germany was high during World War 11.

“People here had a shock awakening in 1945. Support for Nazism was not over its racial aspect, but over hopes that Germany would return to replace South Africa,” he said in an interview.

Four decades on, South Africa still controls Namibia, a vast region twice the size of West Germany, despite repeated United Nations demands for independence for the 1 million residents.

Swakopmund still holds reminders of the war which ravaged Europe in the 19405.

Mrs Gerda Penzin, who now mixes cocktails at the bar of a seaside hotel, left Hamburg in 1955 on a gruelling trip to end up in Namibia. "Germany was ruined and young people then were looking for opportunities abroad,” she said. The town, often shrouded in mist as a result of the rendezvous between the chilly Atlantic and hot Namib, is now shedding its German image as the wealth and people brought by Rossing bolster the English-speaking community.

German has given way to English as the business language and alongside buildings dating to the turn of the century, new housing developments have risen to accommodate the influx.

“The self-imposed segregation between German and British is beginning to break down, but the Germans are still top dogs,” said the British expatriate.