When we think of Germany and genocide, we typically think of the Holocaust, wherein some 15 million Jews, Roma, homosexuals and others deemed “undesirable” by the Third Reich were systematically exterminated between 1941 and 1945. But policies of mass murder go back much further in German history than many dare admit. For some 30 years before the Nazis came to power, the Imperial German government of Kaiser Wilhelm II committed an atrocity in a remote corner of its empire which has come to be recognized as the 20th Century’s first genocide – and a blueprint for many crimes to come....