Blacks during the Holocaust
By Lari Gilges
The
photo is the cover of an anti-black and antisemitic Nazi propaganda brochure. Duesseldorf, Germany, 1938...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
World War I, the Allies stripped Germany of its African colonies.
The German military stationed in Africa (Schutztruppen), as well as
missionaries, colonial bureaucrats, and settlers, returned to Germany and
took with them their racist attitudes. Separation of whites and blacks was
mandated by the Reichstag (German parliament), which enacted a law against
mixed marriages in the African colonies.
Following
World War I and the Treaty of Versailles (1919), the victorious Allies occupied
the Rhineland in western Germany.
The use of French colonial troops, some of whom were black, in these occupation
forces exacerbated anti-black racism in Germany. Racist propaganda against
black soldiers depicted them as rapists of German women and carriers of
venereal and other diseases. The children of black soldiers and German women
were called “Rhineland Bastards.” The Nazis, at the time a small political
movement, viewed them as a threat to the purity of the Germanic race. In Mein
Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler charged that “the Jews had brought the Negroes into
the Rhineland with the clear aim of ruining
the hated white race by the necessarily-resulting bastardization.”
African
German mulatto children were marginalized in German society, isolated socially
and economically, and not allowed to attend university. Racial discrimination
prohibited them from seeking most jobs, including service in the military. With
the Nazi rise to power they became a target of racial and population policy. By
1937, the Gestapo (German secret state police) had secretly rounded up and
forcibly sterilized many of them. Some were subjected to medical experiments;
others mysteriously “disappeared.”
The
racist nature of Adolf Hitler's regime was disguised briefly during the Olympic
Games in Berlin in August 1936, when Hitler
allowed 18 African American athletes to compete for the U.S. team.
However, permission to compete was granted by the International Olympic
Committee and not by the host country.
Adult
African Germans were also victims. Both before and after World War I, many
Africans came to Germany
as students, artisans, entertainers, former soldiers, or low-level colonial
officials, such as tax collectors, who had worked for the imperial colonial
government. Hilarius (Lari) Gilges, a dancer by profession, was murdered by the
SS in 1933, probably because he was black. Gilges' German wife later received
restitution from a postwar German government for his murder by the Nazis.
Some
African Americans, caught in German-occupied Europe
during World War II, also became victims of the Nazi regime. Many, like female
jazz artist Valaida Snow, 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 and its
subcamp, Tittmoning, both in Upper Bavaria.
European
and American blacks were also interned in the Nazi concentration camp system.
Lionel Romney, a sailor in the U.S. Merchant Marine, was imprisoned in the
Mauthausen concentration camp. Jean Marcel Nicolas, a Haitian national, was
incarcerated 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 Tanganyika
(today Tanzania) died in the
Sachsenhausen camp, near Berlin.
Black
prisoners of war faced illegal incarceration and mistreatment at the hands of
the Nazis, who did not uphold the regulations imposed by the Geneva Convention
(international agreement on the conduct of war and the treatment of wounded and
captured soldiers). Lieutenant Darwin Nichols, an African American pilot, was
incarcerated in 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.
Others were never even incarcerated, but were instead immediately killed by the
SS or Gestapo.
Some
African American members of the U.S. Armed forces were liberators and witnesses
to Nazi atrocities. The 761st Tank Battalion (an all-African American tank
unit), attached to the 71st Infantry Division, U.S. Third Army, under the command
of General George Patton, participated in the liberation of Gunskirchen, a
subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp, in May 1945.
source: United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum
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