Short-lived attempts at colonization by individual German states had occurred in preceding centuries, but Bismarck resisted pressure to construct a colonial empire until the Scramble for Africa in 1884.

Then, the costs which the foundation, maintenance, and especially the establishment of claims to colonies entail very often exceed the utility which the Motherland gets from them, entirely apart from the fact that it is difficult to justify placing significant tax burdens on the whole nation for the benefit of individual commercial and industrial interests.

[citation needed] Bismarck remained opposed to these arguments and preferred an informal commercial imperialism, in which German companies carried out profitable trade with areas outside Europe and made economic inroads without the occupation of territories or the construction of states.

On 16 July 1878, the commander of the screw corvette SMS Ariadne, Bartholomäus von Werner [de] occupied Falealili and Saluafata on the Samoan island of Upolu "in the name of the Empire".

[31] In the very next year Bismarck shed personal involvement when "he abandoned his colonial drive as suddenly and casually as he had started it" – as if he had committed an error in judgment that could confuse the substance of his more significant policies.

In November 1882, the Bremen-based tobacco merchant Adolf Lüderitz contacted the Foreign Office and requested protection for a trade station south of Walvis Bay on the southwest African coast.

In February, imperialist and "man-of-action" Carl Peters accumulated vast tracts of land for his Society for German Colonization, "emerging from the bush with X-marks [affixed by unlettered tribal chiefs] on documents ... for some 160,000 km2 (60,000 sq mi) of the Zanzibar Sultanate's mainland property.

Such exploratory missions required security measures that could be solved with small private, armed contingents recruited mainly in the Sudan and usually led by adventurous former military personnel of lower rank.

Brutality, hanging and flogging prevailed during these land-grab expeditions under Peters' control as well as others as no-one "held a monopoly in the mistreatment of Africans",[45][46] and in April 1885, the brothers Clemens and Gustav Denhardt acquired Wituland in modern Kenya.

The liberal-imperialist ideal of an overseas policy grounded in private economic initiatives, which he had held from the beginning, was not changed much by placing German merchants' possessions under the protection of the Empire.

[59] The author Charles Miller offers the theory that the Germans had the handicap of trying to colonize African areas inhabited by aggressive tribes,[60] whereas their colonial neighbors had more docile peoples to contend with.

After Bismarck had ended the policy of colonial acquisition in March 1890, he concluded the Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty with Britain on 1 July 1890, in which Germany renounced all remaining claims north of German East Africa.

[66] Others who followed, especially Bernhard von Bülow, as foreign minister and chancellor, sanctioned the acquisition of further Pacific Ocean colonies and provided substantial treasury assistance to existing protectorates to employ administrators, commercial agents, surveyors, local "peacekeepers" and tax collectors.

In an interview with Cecil Rhodes in March 1899 he stated the alleged dilemma clearly: "... Germany has begun her colonial enterprise very late, and was, therefore, at the disadvantage of finding all the desirable places already occupied.

Following the Juye Incident of 1 November 1897, in which two German missionaries from the Society of the Divine Word were murdered, Kaiser Wilhelm dispatched the East Asia Squadron to occupy Jiaozhou Bay and its chief port Qingdao on the southern coast of the Shandong peninsula.

On 6 March 1901, as part of preparatory work by the Imperial postal service for laying a German underwater telegraph cable, the colonial official Arno Senfft [de] took possession of Sonsorol island.

South Africa's J. C. Smuts, now in Britain's small War Cabinet, spoke of German schemes for world power, militarization and exploitation of resources, indicating Germany threatened western civilization itself.

[128] The victors retained the German overseas possessions and did so with the belief that Australian, Belgian, British, French, Japanese, New Zealand, Portuguese and South African rule was superior to Germany's.

Nearly all the parties elected to the Weimar National Assembly on 19 January 1919, voted in favor of a resolution which demanded the return of the colonies on 1 March 1919, i.e. while the Paris Peace Conference was still in progress.

[140][141] In 1934, the Nazi Party established its own Office of Colonial Policy, which was led by Heinrich Schnee, and then Franz Ritter von Epp and was a very active grass roots organization.

According to Willeke Sandler: "Between 1933 and 1943, Rudolf Hess, Martin Borman, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, among others, hindered colonialists' publicity activities, seeing them as representative of a discarded past and as irrelevant when compared with Eastern European 'Lebensraum.

They had substantial success, since the breakdown of precolonial society, which the German land seizures and colonial wars had engendered, often brought a spiritual crisis with it and the indigenous people sought comfort and support from the god of the new rulers, who appeared to have proven his superiority.

Since the goal of the missionaries was the conversion of the indigenous peoples and they emphasized the virtue of neighborly love, they often had cause to protest against their abuse and exploitation by the colonial administration and plantation owners.

Staff specialists and the occasional visiting university group conducted soil analyses, developed plant hybrids, experimented with fertilizers, studied vegetable pests and ran courses in agronomy for settlers and natives and performed a host of other tasks.

[105] Successful German plantation operators realized the benefits of systematic scientific inquiry and instituted and maintained their own stations with their own personnel, who further engaged in exploration and documentation of the native fauna and flora.

[96] Medical doctors the world over benefited from pioneering work into tropical diseases and German pharmaceutical discoveries "became a standard therapy for sleeping sickness and relapsing fever.

[174] In recent years scholars have debated the "continuity thesis" that links German colonialist brutalities to the treatment of Jews, Roma, Poles and Russians during World War II.

At the end of 1952, members of the Ewe people submitted in a memorandum to the United Nations Trusteeship Council proposing that the territories of German Togoland taken by the British and the French be reunited and led towards independence together.

According to his biographers Leonard Mosley and Robert Gaudi, these activists often travelled to West Germany, during the last decades before the Decolonisation of Africa, to seek the advice of their fathers' former commanding officer, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck.

[189] According to Der Spiegel journalists Heinz Höhne and Hermann Zolling, the premature end of the German colonial empire in 1918 placed West Germany's Cold War foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) and its founding chief Reinhard Gehlen at a considerable advantage in dealing with the newly independent governments of post-colonial Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.