Bundestag debates Namibia genocide, but Germany's colonial reckoning stalls

Gaob Daniel Timotheus Frederick sat in the Bundestag visitors' gallery this week in a suit and hat, having traveled from Namibia to witness a parliamentary debate that his family had been waiting nearly 120 years to see. He came to demand what his ancestors never received: an unconditioned apology from Germany, and the return of human remains. His great-grandfather, Cornelius Frederick, had led Nama resistance against German colonial rule and died on Shark Island, site of Germany's first concentration camp. Beside him sat Paramount Chief Mutjinde Katjiua of the Ovaherero Traditional Authority, uniformed and carrying a walking stick carved with a lion. Before the debate began, Katjiua spoke plainly: the Bundestag must recognize the genocides committed against the Ovaherero and Nama peoples.

For more than a century, this recognition has not come. Between 1904 and 1908, the German Empire waged systematic war against the Indigenous populations of southwestern Africa—the Ovaherero, Nama, Damara, and San. At least 100,000 people were killed. Another 100,000 were displaced. Survivors endured forced labor and forced prostitution. The land seizures that followed continue to shape the lives of their descendants today. Yet the Bundestag has passed resolutions recognizing the Armenian genocide, the Holodomor in Ukraine, and atrocities against the Yazidis. It has not recognized this one. Jürgen Zimmerer, a historian at the University of Hamburg who specializes in African history, told Deutsche Welle that the absence reflects a simple lack of political will. If the parliament chose to act, he said, it could happen very quickly.

The obstacle is not ignorance but calculation. Since 2021, Germany and Namibia have negotiated a joint declaration in which Germany acknowledges that what happened would today be called genocide. But the government has stopped short of formal recognition and has rejected the language of reparations. Instead, it offers €1.1 billion in reconstruction aid spread over thirty years. Once this agreement is signed, Germany's president will issue a formal apology. Chief Katjiua has rejected this framework outright. Development assistance, he said, cannot substitute for comprehensive reparations. The Left Party, sensing the gap between what descendants demand and what the government will offer, initiated the Bundestag debate and drafted a resolution calling for full recognition and compensation negotiated directly with victim representatives—what they termed restorative justice.

The Foreign Ministry defended its approach as pioneering. Legal claims to compensation, it argued, cannot be derived from genocide recognition alone. Germany and Namibia were breaking new ground, the ministry said, in confronting their colonial past. But Andreas Mehler, a political scientist at the University of Freiburg, saw something else: checkbook diplomacy. Zimmerer offered a starker diagnosis. Recognizing an obligation to pay reparations to families of genocide victims, he said, would create a financial exposure the government fears it cannot bear—given the millions killed in World War II and other German atrocities. The calculation, in other words, is not about Namibia alone but about what recognizing one genocide might obligate Germany to do for others.

The current German government—a coalition of the conservative CDU/CSU and the center-left SPD—has devoted four lines in its 144-page coalition agreement to reconciliation with Namibia. The text promises intensified efforts to confront colonialism, including research into artifacts, restitution of cultural property, establishment of a memorial site, and repatriation of human remains. But compared with the previous SPD-led government's work from 2021 to 2025, the issue has lost visibility. Zimmerer is more blunt: he no longer calls it a stalemate. He believes this government is actively rolling back the progress made in raising awareness of colonial injustices.

The practical work remains undone. Tens of thousands of human remains are believed to still be held in Germany. In March, the government established a coordination council headed by the Foreign Ministry to manage restitution. The council stated it would not dictate to countries of origin which artifacts or remains they should reclaim or how restitutions should proceed. Serap Güler, a state minister in the Foreign Ministry and chair of the council, defended the approach as sincere and trusting. She has traveled to Togo and plans visits to Rwanda and Burundi, she said, and everywhere receives recognition for Germany's commitment to confronting the past.

Yet the memorial landscape tells a different story. Zimmerer notes that Germany has built a reputation as a country that critically examines its own history and learns from mistakes—a form of cultural capital that carries weight globally. But that capital is being squandered, he argues, through what amounts to marginalization of German colonial crimes. The government's recent proposal for a dignified memorial site in Bremen, drafted by Minister of State for Culture Wolfram Weimer, excludes victim groups from its design. More starkly, Zimmerer points to Hamburg's Baakenhafen, from which ninety-five percent of colonial troops departed, including Commander Lothar von Trotha, who ordered the extermination of the Ovaherero and Nama. A new opera house is being built there instead of a memorial—what Zimmerer calls art-washing of history. Mehler hopes a productive debate on memorial sites will still occur, that more places will reckon with colonial history.

Meanwhile, Gaob D. Timotheus Frederick continues to press for what he calls a collective effort to come to terms with the past. The affected communities, he said, must have a seat at the table. They must be part of deciding what comes next. The Bundestag debate happened. The descendants were present to witness it. But whether it will move Germany toward the recognition and repatriation they seek remains uncertain.