Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

German colonial authorities regarding the construction of a railway line through Herero territory,
accompanied by the concentration of all Herero in reservations. On January 12,
1904, Samuel led a rebellion against German rule in Hereroland. So far as can be ascertained,
the Herero people at this time numbered about eighty thousand. The first assault
against the German settlers, directed by Samuel, saw the death of up to a hundred German
men; subsequent attacks killed hundreds more. (Samuel issued orders that women
and children were to be spared.) The German authorities’ response was one of counterattack,
the bringing in of reinforcements, and, ultimately, a widespread campaign of annihilation
in which Herero were shot, displaced, and forced into the Omaheke Desert,
where tens of thousands perished. Part and parcel of the attack involved orders, issued by
German general Lothar von Trotha (1848–1920), that all waterholes be located and poisoned.
All in all, some 80 percent of the Herero people perished in the genocide, together
with 50 percent of the related Nama population. Samuel was driven into the desert with
the rest of his people, and, though the Germans made it a special mission to locate him,
they were unable to do so before he reached sanctuary in British Bechuanaland (now
Botswana). He remained there throughout World War I, ultimately seeing the fall of
German rule in his homeland. He died in exile in 1923, the acknowledged leader of the
first victim population to suffer genocide in the twentieth century.
Majdanek. See Lublin-Majdanek.
Malleus Maleficarum (Latin, The Witches’ Hammer). A book published in Germany
between 1485 and 1487 (accounts of the exact date vary) by Catholic Inquisition authorities.
Written by Heinrich Kramer (1430?–1505) and Jakob Sprenger (1436–1495), it is
regarded as a handbook for witch hunters. The spread of the witch craze at the end of the
fifteenth century and throughout the sixteenth century can, perhaps, be attributed to the
theories of conspiracy and presumed evil which were expounded in this volume, particularly
in a Germany that was wrestling with the challenge to Catholic doctrine wrought by
the advance of Lutheranism.
The last two decades of the fifteenth century saw the start of a noticeable change in
Europe’s climate, with wild extremes in weather resulting in famine in some areas, crop
damage in others, and a decrease in livestock numbers in yet others. As Europeans sought
desperately to find reasons to account for these developments, witches, who had in earlier
times been viewed as folk healers, wise women, and (on occasion) nontraditional religious
leaders, were henceforth accused of being in league with the Devil. It was this relationship,
it was believed, that brought about the human suffering and physical destruction
pervading European society. The authors of Malleus Maleficarum had two basic purposes
in writing the book: (1) to help reestablish the authority of the Catholic Church in the
areas that had been “tainted” by Protestantism; and (2) to see that the perpetrators who
threatened change were punished, thus making an example of them so that others would
not be tempted to follow their purportedly diabolical ways. An egregiously misogynistic
work that simultaneously damned women and invested them with malevolent power, the
Malleus was widely distributed owing to the recently invented printing press. As a result of
its extensive reach, it was enormously influential; the upshot saw tens of thousands of innocent
women executed as witches over a three hundred year period, and scores of thousands
of trials. Malleus Maleficarum can thus be classified as a work of particularly destructive
power, which targeted a specific group for punishment and death—notwithstanding that
witches possessed of the power alleged by their accusers did not exist.
MALLEUS MALEFICARUM
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