"Dear Pope Francis, Namibia was the 20th century’s first genocide"

"when the media analysts at the Vatican scrutinise the social media traffic of the past seven days, their eyes might well be drawn away from Turkey and the Armenian diaspora towards a cluster of tweets, comments and Facebook posts that emanate from Africa. There, another debate raged last week. The pope’s description of the Armenian massacre as “the first genocide of the 20th century” was simply incorrect. That grim distinction belongs to the genocide that imperial Germany unleashed a decade earlier against the Herero and Nama, two ethnic groups who lived in the former colony of South West Africa, modern Namibia.
The Namibian genocide, 1904-1909, was not only the first of the 20th century; in so many ways, it also seemed to prefigure the later horrors of that troubled century. The systematic extermination of around 80% of the Herero people and 50% of the Nama was the work both of German soldiers and colonial administrators; banal, desk-bound killers. The most reliable figures estimate 90,000 people were killed."
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/18/pope-francis-armenian-genocide-first-20th-century-namibia?CMP=fb_gu

That's so deeply chilling. I am sure there are horrifying links between this and the later holocaust. So much of colonialism involved experimentation on human beings and human societies.
Thinking about the mentalities of early 20th century empires, and the strange ways that greater knowledge about human biology and evolution are a reflection of this general zeitgeist of exploration and manipulation.