Czech and South African archaeologists trace the persecution of African Germans

During the Second World War, around 1,200 Germans were interned at Camp Andalusia in South Africa. Archaeologists from the Czech Academy of Sciences, the University of West Bohemia and Sol Plaatje University identified the camp's exact location and documented the site for a future 3D reconstruction.

South West Africa (present-day Namibia) and East Africa (present-day Tanganyika, Rwanda and Burundi) were German colonies until 1919. The German population formed a numerical minority, but an economically and politically dominant elite. Following the Versailles Peace Conference, which, together with the First World War, brought an end to the German colonial empire, German farmers, miners, artisans and merchants came under increasing British political and cultural pressure.

After the outbreak of the Second World War, adult men from this community were interned as potentially hostile foreign nationals in several detention camps. One of these, known as Camp Andalusia, was located in central South Africa near the town of Jan Kempdorp. Approximately 1,200 men were held there.

"They were joined by German nationals from the Reich who happened to be in British-controlled territories in southern Africa, as well as the crews of seized German merchant ships. What followed after the war, between 1946 and 1948, is also well known from European history. Although the interned Germans had obviously been unable to engage in hostile activities or commit war crimes during their internment, a wave of forced repatriations followed, with entire families deported back to Germany on the grounds of collective political unreliability," explains Jan Hasil, head of the expedition from the Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague.

Two Hundred Bungalows Reconstructed in 3D

Using historical plans and aerial photographs, Czech archaeologists, together with their South African colleagues, rediscovered in May—eighty years after the camp's closure—the structural remains of its buildings. The most prominent features are dozens of bungalows, although the camp originally contained around two hundred.

"It was known that the camp had stood on the grounds of a farm called Andalusia, but its exact layout had never been established. As a result, it was unclear which ruins in the wider area belonged to the camp and which were associated with South African army barracks or later civilian settlement, or precisely where the camp had survived and where it had been destroyed," says Jan Hasil.

The bungalows—standardized prefabricated corrugated iron structures—each housed six internees. In striking contrast to their austere military appearance, many featured small front gardens built from local stone or other available materials, where the internees cultivated fruit, vegetables and ornamental flowers. This is also documented by a series of watercolours painted by camp residents, now preserved at the Museum Café in Jan Kempdorp.

During the transdisciplinary research, the team combines a wide range of historical sources and research data. "The remains of individual buildings and the camp infrastructure were documented using drones and modern surveying techniques capable of centimeter-level accuracy. The result will be orthophoto maps of the entire camp and detailed 3D models—as if we could bring Camp Andalusia back home to Europe," says Petr Hasil, a 3D specialist from the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen and Jan Hasil's brother.

The researchers will continue working with the collected material, critically interpreting surviving plans, drawings and other historical sources. The project also opens the way for future excavations and geophysical surveys.

Internment Camps as a Key to Understanding the Modern Era

The research forms part of the project The Wild Country: Archaeological and Transdisciplinary Research into Resilience Strategies in the Twentieth Century, funded under the OP JAK program by the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports and co-financed by the European Union. Researchers from the Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague and the University of West Bohemia aim to investigate internment facilities and state terror from a global archaeological perspective—from the Soviet Gulag system in Kazakhstan, through Nazi concentration and forced labour camps in the Czech Republic and Poland, and sites of communist forced labour in the Czech Republic, to the British internment camp in South Africa. They approach these places as a distinctive type of settlement within the landscape, as instruments of social engineering, as spaces of everyday life and cultural expression for internees, and, not least, as sites of memory.

"Understanding the phenomenon of internment camps through the archaeology of conflict, and preserving their material remains, is essential if we are to understand how the modern world was shaped. Wars, mass violence, state terror and internment have profoundly influenced societies, and their legacy continues to shape our daily reality. The Andalusia site is also connected with the South African War (1899–1902), Black forced labor camps near Jan Kempdorp and Kimberley, and concentration camps for both Black Africans and Boers across our region and throughout South Africa. Such places of conflict become part of a global story, reflected in our joint project and our vision of a connected humanity," concludes Garth Benneyworth of Sol Plaatje University in Kimberley.