Wilhelmine rule in German South West Africa was not the sole inspiration for [Fascist] policies in Eastern Europe, but it contributed ideas, methods, and a lexicon that [Fascist] leaders borrowed and expanded. Language, literature, media, institutional memory, and individual experience all transmitted these concepts, methods and terms to the [Fascists].

[…]

Colonial Namibia’s death camp at Shark Island was different from Spanish and British concentration camps in that it was operated for the purpose of destroying human life. Thus, it served as a rough model for later [Fascist] Vernichtungslager, or annihilation camps, like Treblinka and Auschwitz, whose primary purpose was murder.

The second variant, German South West African work camps, were also innovative: geared not merely toward incarcerating guerilla rebels and potentially sympathetic civilians, as in Cuba and South Africa, their purpose was to extract economic value from prisoners under conditions that camp administrators anticipated would lead to mass fatalities. Thus, the Second Reich’s colonial Namibian work camps provided a rough template for Third Reich concentration camps like Buchenwald and Dachau.

[…]

To facilitate German domination of the territory, Bismarck selected Doctor Heinrich Göring. Thus, from 1885 to 1891, Hermann Göring’s father served as the first Reichskommissar for German South West Africa, befriending Cecil Rhodes, suppressing African revolts, deploying German troops, signing treaties, working to occupy hundreds of thousands of square miles, and frequently flogging Africans.¹⁷⁰

Although not entirely successful in subduing Namibia’s African peoples, Doctor Göring established a new colony that profoundly changed the region; until 26 January 1994, a major boulevard in Namibia’s capital bore his name: Heinrich Göring Straße.¹⁷¹

Back in [the Second Reich], when Hermann Göring was three years old his father retired and, with time on his hands, the father doted on his son. He allowed the boy to play with the swords and caps of visiting military officers, regularly took Hermann to Sunday military parades in Potsdam, and presented him with a Hussar’s uniform at the age of five.¹⁷² Returning this paternal affection, the 20-year-old Hermann wept openly at his father’s 1913 funeral.¹⁷³

Göring’s authorized, official 1939 [Fascist] biography presented a son transfixed by his father’s colonial exploits: ‘The inquisitive and imaginative lad was very keenly interested in his father’s campaigning as a Reserve officer in the Wars of 1866 and 1870, but he was even more thrilled by his accounts of his pioneer work as Reichs Commissar for South-West Africa […] and his fights with Maherero, the black King of Okahandja’.¹⁷⁴ The biography went on to celebrate Doctor Göring’s ‘establish[ment] of the colony on a firm basis [as] a glorious chapter in German colonial history’.¹⁷⁵

Seven years after the publication of this biography, at his Nuremberg trial, Göring listed ‘the position of my father as first Governor of Southwest Africa’ as one of the four most important ‘points which are significant with relation to my later development’.¹⁷⁶ As he prepared to make this statement, Göring had on his prison desk an old photo of his father in the uniform of the German South West African Reichskommissar.¹⁷⁷

(Emphasis added.)

The author does not appear to have a citation for the claim that GSWA’s camps served as early or partial models for any of the Axis’s own death camps and concentration camps. (Given the grand quantity of documentation that the German Colonial Administration destroyed in 1915, and the Axis destroyed in 1945, such evidence is likely nonexistent.) Nevertheless, a conscious and direct borrowing might have been unneeded, because even if such camps were never particularly on any Axis official’s mind at all during his own extermination campaigns — which would be a most astonishing coincidence — one thing remains certain: such camps helped normalize methods that the Axis would reuse and refine decades later.

For comprehensive looks at this important subject, see The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism, The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich, and From Windhoek to Auschwitz? Reflections on the Relationship between Colonialism and National Socialism.