Persecution of black people in Nazi Germany

Template:Short description While black people in Nazi Germany were never subject to an organized mass extermination program, as in the cases of Jews, homosexuals, Romani, and Slavs, they were still considered by the Nazis to be an inferior race and along with Romani people were subject to the Nuremberg Laws under a supplementary decree.

Background

Before the events of World War II, Germany struggled with the idea of African mixed-race German citizens. While interracial marriage was legal under German law at the time, beginning in 1890, some colonial officials started refusing to register them, using eugenics arguments about the supposed inferiority of mixed-race children to support their decision.Template:Sfn By 1912, this had become official policy in many German colonies, and a debate in the Reichstag over the legality of the interracial marriage bans ensued. A major concern brought up in debate was that mixed-race children born in such marriages would have German citizenship, and could therefore return to Germany with the same rights to vote, serve in the military, and could also hold public office as full-blooded ethnic Germans.Template:Sfn

File:Bundesarchiv Bild 102-15664, Farbiger Junge.jpg

Young Rhinelander who was classified as a bastard and hereditarily unfit under the Nazi regime.

After World War I, French occupation forces in the Rhineland included African colonial troops, some of whom fathered children with German women. Newspaper campaigns against the use of these troops focused on these children, dubbed "Rhineland bastards", often with lurid stories of uncivilized African soldiers raping innocent German women, the so-called "Black Horror on the Rhine". In the Rhineland itself, local opinion of the troops was very different, and the soldiers were described as "courteous and often popular", possibly because French colonial soldiers harbored less ill will towards Germans than war-weary ethnic French occupiers.Template:Sfn While subsequent discussions of Afro-German children revolved around these "Rhineland Bastards" only 400–600 children were born to such unions,Template:Sfn compared to a total Black population of 20,000–25,000 in Germany at the time.Template:Sfn

In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler described children resulting from marriages to African occupation soldiers as a contamination of the white race "by negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe." He thought that "Jews were responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the White race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate." He also implied that this was a plot on the part of the French since the population of France was being increasingly "negrified".

Rhineland sterilisation program

Race alone was not sufficient criteria for forced sterilization, under Third Reich eugenics laws. Anyone could request sterilization for themselves or a minor under their care.Template:Sfn The cohort of mixed-race children born during the occupation were approaching adulthood when, in 1937, with Hitler's approval, a special Gestapo commission was created and charged with "the discrete sterilization of the Rhineland bastards."Template:Sfn It is unclear how much these minors were told about the procedures, or how many parents only consented under pressure from the Gestapo.Template:Sfn An estimated 500 children were sterilized under this program, including girls as young as eleven years old.Template:Sfn

Civilian life

Beyond the compulsory sterilization program in the Rhineland, there was no coherent Nazi policy towards African Germans.Template:Sfn In one instance, when local officials petitioned for guidance on how to handle an Afro-German who could not find employment because he was a repeat criminal offender, they were told the population was too small to warrant the formulation of any official policy and to settle the case as they saw fit.Template:Sfn Due to the rhetoric at the time, Black Germans experienced discrimination in employment, welfare, and housing, and were also banned from pursuing higher education;Template:Sfn they were socially isolated and forbidden to have sexual relations and marriages with Aryans by the racial laws. Jazz, considered "negro music", (negermusik) and an "inner crisis" to the white race by Nazi cultural theorists was also banned from the radio. Black people were placed at the bottom of the racial scale of non-Aryans along with Jews, Slavs, and Romani/Roma people. Some Black people managed to work as actors in films about the African colonies. Others were hired for the German Africa Show, a human zoo touring between 1937 and 1940.

In the armed forces

The Compulsory Service Act of 21 May 1935 restricted military service to "Aryans" only, but there are several documented cases of Afro-Germans who served in the Wehrmacht, or were temporarily allowed into the Hitler Youth. In one case, an Afro-German man named Peter K. was forcibly sterilized before being drafted.Template:Sfn

Non-German prisoners of war

File:Bundesarchiv Bild 121-0428, Französische Kriegsgefangene.jpg

Black prisoners of war from French Africa, captured in 1940.

The French Army made extensive use of African soldiers during the Battle of France in May–June 1940 and 120,000 became prisoners of war. Most of them came from French West Africa and Madagascar. While no government orders were issued regarding black prisoners of war, some German commanders separated black people from captured French units for summary execution on their initiative.Template:Sfn There are also documented cases of captured African American soldiers in the United States Army suffering the same fate.Template:Sfn

In the absence of any official policy, the treatment of black prisoners of war varied widely, and most captured black soldiers were taken prisoner rather than executed.Template:Sfn However, violence against black prisoners of war was also never prosecuted by Nazi authorities.Template:Sfn In prisoner-of-war camps, black soldiers were kept segregated from white and generally experienced worse conditions than their white comrades. Their conditions deteriorated further in the last days of the war.Template:Sfn Roughly half of the French colonial prisoners of war did not survive captivity.Template:Sfn Groups such as North Africans were sometimes treated as black and sometimes as white.Template:Sfn

See also

• Morenazi

References

Notes

Bibliography

Further reading

• Template:Trim Destined to Witness at the Internet Archive

External links

• "Blacks during the Holocaust" and exhibition for "Black History Month" from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum