The Schutztruppe (the colonial army of the German Empire) did not leave a good memory in German South West Africa, what is now Namibia, as it was responsible for the first genocide of the 20th century, against the native Herero and Namaqua people. However, Germany officially apologized in 2004, and today, one hundred and twenty years later, one of the country’s most curious monumental and tourist attractions comes precisely from that era. To the Skeleton Coast, Swakopmund, the Epupa Falls, and the national parks—just to mention a few fascinating places—something as unusual as the Duwisib Castle is added, a structure that seems to transport visitors to a kind of African Middle Ages.
Despite its medieval appearance, it is actually a contemporary building, constructed in 1909 by a German settler named Hans Heinrich von Wolf, a former artillery officer of the Schutztruppe. Once the war against the indigenous people ended and after marrying Jayta Humphreys (Summit, New Jersey, 1881), the daughter of the U.S. consul in Germany, he aspired to establish a stud farm for breeding horses. Born in Dresden in 1873, he was the son of Ernst Hugo von Wolf, a major general of artillery in the Königlich Sächsische Armee (Royal Saxon Army), who belonged to a noble family but was not a baron, as is often mistakenly stated.
Young Hans Heinrich followed in his father’s footsteps and began his military career in 1890, serving in Egypt and Hanover until 1901, when he was assigned to Königsbrück as a riding instructor. Three years later, when the Herero uprising broke out, he did as many young men did and requested his discharge from the Saxon army to join the Schutztruppe, entering with the rank of commander. A hasty retreat, in which he lost several men and a cannon, led to a court-martial, but he was acquitted. Later, he was even wounded and earned a couple of decorations: the Rote Adlerorden and the Albrechts-Orden.
While recovering, he obtained leave and returned to Germany, where in 1906 he rejoined the Königsbrück regiment. It was then that he met Jayta, left the army to marry her, and the newlyweds decided to live in Africa. They arrived in the spring of 1907 and applied for the purchase of 140,000 hectares in the Hardap region, of which they were initially granted 20,000, though they later managed to obtain another 30,000. They planned to use the land for horse breeding, as there was high demand due to the scarcity caused by the war and equine plague—endemic in that area—so they imported seventy-two English and Australian horses, thirty-eight of which were mares, nine of them thoroughbreds.
Additionally, they owned eighteen mules and donkeys, about ten pigs, sixty chickens, six hundred Merino and Karakul sheep (Namibia is now one of the world’s leading producers of the latter breed), about one hundred Hereford cattle, and even Arabian dromedaries. Within four years, the number of horses had increased by another three hundred and fifty, allowing them to start selling them to the colonial police and the army. This made them wealthy landowners, and the only reason they did not continue expanding their holdings was that the government denied them permission. Legal restrictions prevented them from accumulating too many estates, and authorities believed it would be impossible to manage such a large farm effectively.
The symbol of this small empire could probably be considered Schloss Duwisib, the castle we mentioned at the beginning. Von Wolf wanted the main residence of the estate to be easy to defend in case of another indigenous uprising, which is why the chosen design was no accident: it imitated the crenelated forts that the Germans had built in the colony, examples of which still exist in Windhoek, such as the castles of Schwerinsburg, Sanderburg, and Heinitzburg, as well as the Tintenpalast, which today serves as the national parliament but was originally an administrative building.
To design it, he hired Wilhelm Sander, a famous Berlin architect who had been based in Africa since 1901 and was also responsible for the mentioned buildings in the capital. The only difference was that the Wolfs’ farm was in a remote location, four hundred kilometers south of Windhoek and three hundred kilometers from the coast, requiring special defensive conditions. Additionally, because it was near the desert, providing infrastructure and services was a significant challenge, as was the need to import all the building materials—except for the distinctive red sandstone from which the castle was constructed.
Everything else, from cement to iron, wood, lamps, and other items, was transported by ship from Europe and then taken to the farm by ox-drawn wagons (twenty-four animals were assigned to this task), sometimes crossing stretches of desert. During construction, which began in 1907 and was not completed until 1909, the owners and their initially small staff (a manager, a saddler brought from Dresden, a horse expert, and a Herero servant), later expanded with the hiring of European masons and carpenters (Italians, Swedes, Irishmen…), as well as native laborers, lived in a rustic cabin and tents.
The couple also did their part during those two years, whether by carrying materials, planting palm trees, or transporting supplies by car. They even traveled to Germany to purchase furniture from Gottorf Castle (in Schleswig-Holstein), which was being auctioned, and to the United States to secure additional financing (Jayta’s grandfather was Frederic Humphreys, a wealthy doctor, homeopath, and pharmaceutical manufacturer). When they returned in March 1909, Schloss Duwisib was practically finished, and it was inaugurated with a grand celebration attended by all the tribal chiefs of the region and colonial dignitaries.
It is a rectangular-shaped building (thirty-five meters long by thirty-one meters wide), featuring an avant-corps or protrusion at each corner, plus a central section topped by a crenelated tower and some machicolations. It houses twenty-two rooms, a cellar, and a courtyard inspired by monastic cloisters, opening to the outside through a single reinforced main door and very few windows, which are also quite small to enhance resistance in the event of a siege, just as Wolf had ordered in case another rebellion arose (except for the glassed-in balcony on the façade, which is slightly larger).
Apart from that, it had the amenities typical of a well-off home of the time, which its owners saw as the beginning of something greater—a true mission that would even include a church. Although Wolf was Protestant, he intended to build a Catholic temple and ordered an altar, an organ, and a stained-glass window from the U.S., which would travel from New York to Hamburg and then to Africa. Unfortunately for his plans, when the steamship Muanza approached Lüderitz with that cargo in August 1914, it received news of the outbreak of World War I, and the captain had to change course for South America.
The same thing happened to the Wolfs, who, after boarding the Gertrud Woermann that very day to travel to England to buy a thoroughbred stallion, found out mid-voyage that Great Britain had declared war on Germany, and the ship ended up in Rio de Janeiro. Some say that Wolf, a military veteran, already foresaw the inevitability of the conflict and, fearing that the colony would fall into British hands, chose to leave with his wife. The fact is that from Brazil, where he was briefly held in custody, he went to New York, where he boarded the Dutch steamship Nieuw Amsterdam (which was neutral) bound for Rotterdam. He wanted to return to his country to enlist.
Legend has it that during a stopover in Vigo (Spain), he pretended to leave the ship but instead disguised himself as a woman and assumed his wife’s identity, continuing the voyage and astonishing the waiters with how much that reserved American woman drank, as she barely left her cabin. This daring ruse allowed him to avoid arrest when the Royal Navy forced the Nieuw Amsterdam to dock for a few days in Southampton, where, after searching it, they arrested two German agents. No one suspected him, and thus he was able to set foot in his country once again, rejoining his old regiment in Königsbrück.
He fought in Flanders and in the Battle of the Somme, where the explosion of a grenade near the French village of La Foret fatally wounded him in the abdomen, ultimately taking his life just two weeks after enlisting. It was September 4, 1916, and he was only forty-three years old. Having become a widow so soon, Jayta either did not want to or could not return to Duwisib Castle—first, because German South West Africa was no longer German but had come under British control; and second, because she likely did not have particularly fond memories, as the farm had not worked out as they had hoped, requiring more land to be profitable due to its extreme dryness (the fertile lands had already been claimed long before their arrival).
This had led her late husband to drown his frustrations in alcohol, as we saw him continue to do aboard the ship, or to take risky chances in other economic ventures, such as diamond prospecting, which also proved fruitless. For all these reasons, the widow chose to stay in Bavaria, where her father was the U.S. consul in Munich.
In the late 1930s, as the prospect of another world war loomed, she settled in neutral Switzerland, in Zurich, where she remarried Erich Schlemmer, the consul general in Siam. In 1945, she returned to New Jersey, staying permanently with her parents until she passed away in the early 1960s. What, in the meantime, became of the farm and the castle?
When the Wolfs left, they entrusted their friend, Count Max Graf von Lüttichau, as their attorney-in-fact, but at the end of World War I, the business went bankrupt, and the property had to be sold. The Swedish Murrmann family bought it for £7,500, but they also failed to make it viable because the father died soon after, and his only son, a member of the South African Air Force (SAAF), was killed in World War II. Consequently, another transaction took place for £25,000. The new owner was a private company, Duwisib Pty Ltd, which kept the castle but divided the land and sold it in parcels.
Thus, that failed enterprise was distributed among various hands and continued changing ownership throughout the 20th century until 1979, when the Namibian government purchased it to incorporate it into its historical heritage. Restored in 1991, since 2014, it has been an eight-room hotel under the Namibia Wildlife Resorts chain—complete with a swimming pool, an adjoining campsite, and a museum of antique weapons—while also serving as a monumental tourist attraction, much like the wild desert horses roaming freely in the Garub region, which, according to popular belief—though experts disagree—descend from the Wolfs’ herds, released by von Lüttichau when he could no longer maintain them.
This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on March 11, 2025: Duwisib, un insólito castillo medieval en el desierto de Namibia
SOURCES
Chris Marais, A Drink of Dry Land. Journeys Through Namibia
Chris McIntyre, Namibia
Amelie Meier, Eine Geschichte von Luxus und Liebe
Wikipedia, Castillo Duwisib
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