The forgotten black victims of Nazi Germany

The forgotten black victims of Nazi Germany

BY

BLACK AMONG WHITE: This unknown black girl was photographed when Hitler came to power

What Hitler did to the races he deemed ‘inferior’

National Halocaust Day held earlier this month was largely set up to commemorate the six million million Jewish men, women and children murdered by Hitler’s Nazi regime.

While much has been written about these Jewish victims, the fate of other groups at the hands of the Nazi’s is less well documented. Another 5 million ‘others’ died in Nazi concentration camps and included groups as diverse as communists, gays, Jehovah's Witness, gypsies, and the physical and mentally handicapped.

Only in fairly recent times have academics looked at the fate of black people who were living in Nazi controlled Europe and captured black prisoner of wars. Indeed the fact that there were any black people living in Germany at the time of Adolph Hitler is a surprise to many.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., “The fate of black people from 1933 to 1945 in Nazi Germany and in German-occupied territories ranged from isolation to persecution, sterilization, medical experimentation, incarceration, brutality, and murder. However, there was no systematic program for their elimination as there was for Jews and other groups.”

After Germany’s defeat in the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 stripped the nation of its African colonies and many of the Germans based in Africa returned bringing with them strong racist attitudes.

The Versailles treaty also allowed the Allies to occupy the Rhineland in western Germany where the use of French colonial troops, some of whom were African, encouraged anti-black sentiment in Germany.

The notion of Africans controlling white Germans infuriated many in the country and racist propaganda portrayed the African troops who had relationships with locals as rapists of German women and spreaders of sexual and other diseases.

The children of black soldiers and German women were called ‘Rhineland bastards’ and the Nazis, then a fringe political movement, viewed them as a threat to German racial purity. In his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler stated that ‘the Jews had brought the Negroes into the Rhineland with the clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily-resulting bastardisation’.

When Hitler came to power, many of these mixed-race Germans were rounded up by the German secret police, the Gestapo and forcibly sterilized.

According to academic Terese Pencak Schwartz, who has extensively researched the subject,

“The Nazis set up a secret group, Commission Number 3, to organize the sterilization of these offspring to keep intact the purity of the Aryan race. In 1937, all local authorities in Germany were to submit a list of all the children of African descent. Then, these children were taken from their homes or schools without parental permission and put before the commission.

“Once a child was decided to be of black descent, the child was taken immediately to a hospital and sterilized. About 400 children were medically sterilized -- many times without their parents' knowledge.” says Schwartz.

Hans Hauck, a victim of Hitler's sterilisation program, told decades later in a documentary film ‘Hitler's Forgotten Victims’, that when he was forced to undergo the painful operation as a teenager, he was given no anaesthetic. Once he received his sterilization documentation, he was ‘free to go’, so long as he agreed to have no sexual relations with German women.

There were an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 black people living in Germany at the time of Hitler coming to power. Some were Africans who had come from German colonies, some from the French African troops who had stayed in Germany after the First World War, and others from other parts of the world who were working in Germany often as entertainers.

Prior to Hitler coming to power, black entertainers were popular in Germany, but the Nazi hatred of other ‘inferior’ races led to a ban on Jazz music which was seen as ‘corrupt negro music’.

While not subject to an orgainsed, official policy of ethnic extermination like the Jews, black people did not escape the ideology of German racial purity. Apart from those that were forcibly sterilised, others mysteriously disappeared, or ended being used for medical experiments.

Mixed-race people were not allowed to go to university, prevented from joining the military and kept out of many jobs. It was a terrifying time because no person of black origin felt safe. Not knowing if one day there time may be up.

It was Hitler’s obsession and focus on exterminating the Jews which meant that many black people in Germany didn’t get sent immediately to the concentration camps.

What Hitler thought of black people was clear long before the start of the war in 1939. At the 1936 Berlin Olympic games he was so annoyed that black American sprinter Jesse Owens had beaten German athletes and won three golds, that he refused to take part in the awarding of Owen’s medals.

One of the early black victims of the Nazis was Hilarius (Lari) Gilges, a dancer, who was murdered by the SS in 1933. Gilges' German wife later received compensation from a postwar German government for his killing.

African Americans like female jazz trumpeter Valaida Snow, living in German occupied Europe were imprisoned in Axis internment camps for alien nationals. The artist Josef Nassy, living in Belgium, was arrested as an enemy alien and held for seven months in the Beverloo transit camp in German-occupied Belgium. He was later transferred to Germany, where he spent the rest of the war in the Laufen internment camp.

Other black people whose stories are known include: Lionel Romney, a sailor in the U.S. Merchant Marine, who was imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp. Jean Marcel Nicolas, a Haitian, was imprisoned in the Buchenwald and Dora-Mittelbau concentration camps in Germany. Jean Voste, an African Belgian, was incarcerated in the Dachau concentration camp. Bayume Mohamed Hussein from Tanzania died in the Sachsenhausen camp, near Berlin.

Captured black prisoners of war were often shot on the spot or taken to camps were they were segregated from white prisoners. They were subject to harsher treatment and given the worst prison camp jobs.

African-American pilot Lieutenant Darwin Nichols, was sent to a Gestapo prison in Butzbach. Black soldiers of the American, French, and British armies were worked to death on construction projects or died as a result of mistreatment in concentration or prisoner-of-war camps.

Due to the relatively small number of black people in Germany and occupied Europe there was no official Nazi policy of murder. However there was no recording of the numbers of black people including prisoners of war who did at the hands of the Nazis.

* The Imperial War Museum in London will feature a lecture ‘Black Victims of the Nazis’

on February 22 , 1.00pm - 4.30pm at Museum Conference Room. The lecture will focus on the Black victims of Nazi persecution before and during the Second World War. Films will include Black Victims of the Nazis, about the Black population in Germany during the Second World War.

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