THE BOER WAR AND WORLD WAR I
Ahmadnagar’s history into the 20th century is idenfied with the British Raj and everything associated with the colonial power. Ahmadnagar, now a part of the Bombay Presidency, was no longer confined to the task of defending itself against its warring neighbour-states in the Deccan. With a permanent British military cantonment of enormous proportions, it witnessed during the Boer War the introduction of the concentration camp into Indian history. It became the recipient of the Boer prisoners and families from the Transvaal Republic and the Orange Free State of South Africa. In the second Boer War, 1899 – 1902,
Lord Kitchener devised plans to crush this (Boer) resistance. To make sure that captured burghers would not fight again, he deported them to prison camps in St. Helena, Bermuda, Ceylon and India. To stop the commandos from obtaining food, shelter and remounts from the civilian population, he burnt farm buildings, destroyed stock and rounded up the women and children from the countryside and placed them in what were called concentration camps. There, they suffered an appalling mortality from dysentery, measles, enteric fever and other diseases. … By the end of the war, … about 25,000 women and children had died in the camps.32
The concentration camps of the Boer War era marked an unprecedented development in the tactics of warfare. The British not only introduced the concentration camp system into the Empire, but also added an inter-related dimension as a colonial world power. For among the Boer prisoners brought to Ahmadnagar were German missionaries serving in South Africa, who either had expressed their sympathy or who had assisted the burghers in their cause. Hermannsburger missionaries were among those brought to India,33 while other Boer prisoners and families were quartered in Ceylon.34 This phase of British colonial history at the turn of the century too readily remains a forgotten chapter in the treatment of Christian missionaries.
Because of the atrocities during the Boer War, as later in World War I, there was just cause for the German missionary to hold genuine fears towards the colonial rulers in World War II. Paul Gäbler (Leipzig Mission) had grave anxieties for his fellow missionaries, as for himself, that as German prisoners they would be deported to some distant island of the British Empire.35
The German Missions personnel arriving at the Central Alien Internment Camp in September, 1939, were all too aware of Ahmadnagar’s reputation. A Leipzig missionary offered this first-hand report:
We were partly housed in the barracks which had already been constructed in 1901 for the Boers. It was the first internment camp for the Boers coming from South Africa.36
Ahmadnagar, according to Kitchener, was to serve as a concentration camp for prisoners, though it did not possess the crematorium of the Nazi concentration camps. Yet the barbed wire, the watch-towers and the military guards were standard equipment for the British detention camps in India. Thus, as World War II began, a return to Ahmadnagar had particular meaning for the German Missions directors.37
During World War I, in the years 1915 and 1916, most of the German brethren of an estimated 600 German Missions‘ personnel, removed from the mission stations, were brought to Ahmadnagar to await their transport home on the steamship Golconda.38 Among the deportees were twelve members of the American Missouri Synod Lutheran Mission to India.39 The missionary A. Hübener gave this description of Ahmadnagar during World War I;
The largest camp is the A-Camp. Here about 1,000 prisoners of war are accommodated. Four long extended one-floor infantry barracks are enclosed by a double row of barbed wire fences. Between both of the fence enclosures there are guard posts every so often. Inside the camp there is very, very little room for moving around, for exercise and for games for the inmates. This limited space was then primarily required for hundreds of tents, which the majority of the prisoners had to use till the end of 1915.40
Furthermore, it was reported by a prisoner of the camp;
The accommodations in tents and in Nissen huts (corrugated iron) were critical for one’s health and the general provisions were inadequate. Then too they were treated as convicts, and the life in the broiling camp behind the barbed wire severely depressed them emotionally.41
Among the German missionaries transported to the Central Internment Camp-A in 1939 were two men, who during World War I, had previously visited Ahmadnagar as prisoners. Johannes Stosch originally entered the Gossner Mission work in British India in 1913,42 while Karl Heller of the Leipzig Mission had begun his services in South India in 1908.43 Dr. Friedrich Hübner, barely two years in India as a Breklum missionary, also knew Ahmadnagar from World War I times. It was „… very well known to me because of my father being there for two years, from 1914 to 1916, and from having a large book of photographs. I knew Ahmadnagar from my childhood. …“ 44
As World War II brought about a repeat performance at the Ahmadnagar Camp, Carl Ihmels conveyed some encouraging news concerning the German men in internment.
Those Germans, who already were at Ahmednagar in 1914-18, could detect that the camp had been improved in the meantime. In particular the roofs offered better protection from the dangerous radiation of the sun’s rays. Of course at the beginning the younger men had to live in tents. …45
Commenting on the established pattern of the previous wars, the Leipzig missionary Johannes Wagner added: „In 1916 our missionaries came to this place and they were interned there. And there we were interned again.“46