Germany’s colonial genocide at the beginning of the twentieth century against the Herero of then German South West Africa, today Namibia, ranks among the most egregious human right catastrophes. An extermination order (Vernichtungsbefehl) was issued in 1904. In a very short time between 60 000 and 100 000 people; almost all civilians, many of them women and children, were killed by means of German bullets and clubs, by hanging, or by burning the huts where they lived. Many were forced into the desert to die of starvation and thirst or by drinking water at poisoned water wells. Thousands, including women and children were condemned to slavery in the German military and civil institutions, as well as for private companies and on German farms. In the concentration camps the mortality rate was more than 45 percent. Surviving Herero women were forced to become ‘comfort women’ for the settlers and soldiers. German geneticists came to the country to perform racial studies of alleged Herero inferiority. Herero skulls and skeletons were shipped to Germany, supposedly for further study. The book argues that the genocide was not the work of one rogue army general or the practises of the German military in general, but that German colonial policy at the turn of the twentieth century laid the foundation for the Herero genocide; GSWA’s status as ‘new Germany’ precluded the option of military, economic or social failure in the colony; international and domestic political pressures fuelled the Herero genocide; Germany conducted the Herero genocide in order to acquire Herero land, rebuild German pride and fulfil Germany’s racist ideology; the Kaiser ordered the genocide; and Germany’s actions in GSWA provided it with relevant experience to the orchestration of the Holocaust a few decades later.