This 90 minute film will look back on Germany’s colonization of Southwest Africa and explain how the concept of Lebensraum, living space, the treatment of the indigenous population as subhuman, the creation of concentration camps, and the stated policy of annihilation were ideas and methods borrowed and adopted by the Nazis for a future genocide. What role did Heinrich Göring and Franz Ritter von Epp, and in particular, Eugen Fischer the first director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology in Berlin, play in the development of the political, military, and scientific methods that were ultimately to lead to the justification for and the commission of genocide? Special attention will be paid to the Einsatzgruppen as they followed the Wehrmacht into the East.

For this film we will travel to Namibia and South Africa.

Rosemarie Reed Productions is proud to have the following serve as advisors and consultants to this project:

Ben Ferencz, Chief Prosecutor for the United States at the Nuremberg Trials

Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in General Fiction, 1988 and Masters of Death: The SS Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust

Sheila Weiss, President Commission on the role of Kaiser Wilhelm Society in the Era of the National Socialists, professor of history of science at Clarkson University, and the author of Race Hygiene and the National Efficiency: The Eugenics of Wilhelm Schallmayer

Troy Duster, Professor at New York University, Department of Sociology and author of Designing our Descendants: The Promises and Perils of Genetic Modifications

Benjamin Madley, Yale University, author of From Africa to Auschwitz; How German South West Africa incubated ideas and Methods Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe

Currently in pre-production.