Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Destined to Witness Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany by Hans J. Massaquoi The fate of blacks in Nazi Germany. During the Third Reich, Germany had a small black community, yet relatively little is known about their life in the Nazi era. Deutsche Welle takes a look at survival strategies under Hitler's oppressive regime. A sign saying that interaction between blacks and whites degrades the race. Between 20,000 - 25,000 blacks lived in Nazi Germany under Hitler's rule.When asked about blacks in the Third Reich, Germans are most likely to talk about the Afrika Schau. In his book, "Hitler's Black Victims," American University researcher, Dr. Clarence Lusane writes that the Africa Schau was a traveling show that began in 1936. The show's owners were Juliette Tipner, whose mother was from Liberia and her white husband, Adolph Hillerkus. The aim of their spectacle was to showcase African culture in Germany. In 1940, the Afrika Schau was taken over by the SS and Joseph Goebbels who "were hoping that it would become useful not only for propaganda and ideological purposes but also as a way to gather all the blacks in the country under one tent," writes Lusane. For blacks who joined the Afrika Schau, it became a means of survival in Nazi Germany. Duke University historian, Dr. Tina Campt, whose research deals with the African Diaspora in Germany said that "it was possible that blacks who were involved in it used it for purposes that were not the intention of those who organized it. So if the Afrika Schau dehumanized people, there were ways that blacks involved in it could use it as an opportunity to make money, as a site to connect to other black people," she told Deutsche Welle. However, the show was unsuccessful and was shut down in 1941. Also, it could not gather all the blacks in the country under one tent possibly because it only accepted dark-skinned blacks who appealed to the stereotype of what was considered African. The fate of the "Rhineland Bastards" Afro-German Hans J. Massaquoi tried to join the Nazi youth. Most of the light-skinned blacks living in Germany during the Third Reich were of mixed blood, and a good number of them were the children of French-African occupation soldiers and German women in the Rhineland. The existence of these children is and remains common knowledge because they were mentioned in Hitler's book "Mein Kampf" ("My Struggle"). In Nazi Germany, the derogatory term, Rheinlandbastard (Rhineland Bastard), was used to describe them. Deutsche Welle spoke to leading German historian Prof. Reiner Pommerin to find out what happened to these children. "I published a book in the 70s, which told the reader about the sterilization of mixed blood children. These were children who had been fathered by occupation forces - mostly French occupation forces," he said. His book, "Sterilisierung der Rheinlandbastarde. Das Schicksal einer farbigen deutschen Minderheit 1918 - 1937" ("Sterilization of the Rhineland Bastards: the fate of a colored German minority 1918 - 1937") publicized the sterilization of the Black minority in Nazi Germany. Prior to the publication of the book in 1979, this information was unknown to the public. The sterilization of biracial children was carried out secretly because it went against 1938 Nazi laws and procedures. The exact numbers remain unknown, but it is estimated that 400 children of mixed blood were sterilized - most without their knowledge, Pommerin said. Today, the fate of the "Rhineland Bastards" still remains largely unknown. The lack of public knowledge regarding their fate may have to do with the "lack of public interest in minorities," said Pommerin. Campt attributes it to the secrecy behind the sterilization program and the nature of the Afrika Schau. "It has to do with the status of the Afrika Schau as a spectacle. So that was set up as a visual spectacle that was supposed to get people to notice something as a display. In that way, it was really publicized in order to get people to think about," she said. Recognition of the black experience in Nazi Germany. Afro-Germans were excluded from aspects of daily life in the Nazi era. According to Campt, the major difference between the experience of blacks and that of other groups in the Third Reich is the lack of a systematic Nazi extermination plan. Moreover, because of the small number of blacks living in Germany, few people are ready to recognize that there was even a population whose experience can be discussed. Furthermore, there is little or no support in Germany for researchers working in this area. Unlike in the United States where research on minorities is well-funded due to the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, "black German scholars who have been doing this work for years don't necessarily get the recognition on the basis of qualifications, on the basis of whether or not they are working within a certain kind of academic scholarly structure for the study of minority cultures," Campt said. All the same, it should be noted that even though the publication of Pommerin's book on the sterilization of the "Rhineland Bastards" did not generate much public interest at the time, it received some attention from a German politician. The member of the Social Democratic Party asked if he could obtain the names of the victims, so that they could be compensated. Pommerin told Deutsche Welle that "(the politician) wanted to hand over 3,000 German marks ($2,190). I knew where they were living, but I didn't want to bother these people because I could tell that this was more a political interest. And I could see the TV cameras standing in front of the house in the village and money is handed over. And all of a sudden the sensation is great in the village - here is someone who had been sterilized." Author: Chiponda Chimbelu Editor: Rob Mudge. DW recommends. Christmas: Not such a holy night under the Nazis. An exhibition in Cologne shows how Nazis appropriated Christmas symbols to promote their ideology. Images of the holy family, stars and religious songs were manipulated to take the "Christ" out of Christmas. (24.12.2009) New book reopens debate on Heidegger and Nazism. Can a philosopher's life be seperated from his work? The question is at the core of an ongoing debate about German philosopher Martin Heidegger and his links to Nazism in the 1930s. A new book reconsiders the issue. (22.12.2009) Story of Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany Comes to TV. The remarkable life of Hans J Massaquoi, a black boy who grew up in Nazi Germany, is being brought to German television in a precedent-setting two-part docu-drama to be aired on Sunday and Monday. (30.09.2006) Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany The Remarkable Life of Hans Massaquoi. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the photograph taken in 1933 of a brown-skinned boy wearing a swastika in a schoolyard in Hamburg, Germany, does not begin to tell the story of the remarkable life of Hans J. Massaquoi. Mr. Massaquoi, former managing editor of Ebony magazine, has now told the story himself in his new book, Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany . "When I first heard about the book, I stopped in my tracks," said Yvonne Poser, associate professor of German at Howard University, who interviewed Mr. Massaquoi in the Pickford Theater on Feb. 16 as part of the Library's African American History Month program. "His is a victim's story that had yet to be told." The question of how Massaquoi came to be raised in Nazi Germany is one he has been asked "millions of times." Grandson of the Liberian consul general to Hamburg, Mr. Massaquoi was born in 1926 to a well-to-do African father and a German mother. His early life was one of privilege, befitting the grandson of a diplomat. "I associated black skin with superiority, since our servants were white," said Mr. Massaquoi. "My grandfather was 'the man,'" he joked. His circumstances changed dramatically when his father and grandfather returned to Liberia in 1929. Refusing to expose her sickly son to a tropical climate, Mr. Massaquoi's mother chose instead to raise her son in Germany as best she could on her meager wages as a nurse's aide. Although he had spent his early years in a villa, Mr. Massaquoi at first found life in a cold-water flat "interesting." What distressed him most was being the "oddity on the block." "It was a constant problem," he said. "I was always pointed at because of my exotic looks. I just wanted to be like everyone else." Like other boys, he wanted nothing more than to join the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth Movement). "The Nazis put on the best show of all the political parties. There were parades, fireworks and uniforms — these were the devices by which Hitler won over young people to his ideas. Hitler always boasted that despite parents' political persuasion, Germany's youth belonged to him." Mr. Massaquoi was dealt a crushing blow when he learned that the Hitlerjugend as well as the local playground were not open to "non-Aryans." Two events that occurred during the summer of 1936 gave him "a genuine pride in my African heritage at a time when such pride was extremely difficult to come by." Two young black American athletes, boxer Joe Louis and Olympic runner Jesse Owens, dominated the news. Mr. Massaquoi initially supported Germany's Max Schmeling, who was scheduled to fight Louis but quickly switched his allegiance to "the Brown Bomber" in the wake of racist remarks attributed to Schmeling. His classmates had taken to calling him "Joe," which gave him welcomed prestige. "I think I was more crushed than Louis when he lost to Schmeling," joked Mr. Massaquoi. In a rematch several months later, Louis knocked out Schmeling in the first round. Mr. Massaquoi took similar pride in Jesse Owens's now legendary performance at the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin. He had the good fortune to be included when the father of one of his classmates took a group of boys to the games. The triumph of a "non-Aryan" over German athletes was not what Hitler hoped to capture on film when he commissioned German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl to make a documentary of the Olympic games. Years later, while working as a journalist, Mr. Massaquoi met Owens and Louis and thanked them "for allowing me to walk a little taller among my peers that summer." As he grew to adulthood, Mr. Massaquoi was barred from joining the German military, pursuing an education or a preparing for a professional career. Instead he became a machinist's apprentice. After World War II, he immigrated to the United States on a student visa. Although not a citizen, he was ordered to report for military service because of a clerical error and served for two years as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborn Division during the Korean War. He subsequently took advantage of the GI bill and earned a degree in journalism from the University of Illinois, which paved the way for a nearly 40-year career at Ebony magazine. Asked how he survived Hitler's reign of terror, Mr. Massaquoi credits two factors. The fact that there were so few blacks in Germany at the time made them a low priority for mass extermination. Additionally, the rapid advance of the allied troops gave Hitler "more to worry about than Hans Massaquoi." What does he think about Germany today? "I love it. It's my homeland." His opinion of Joerg Haider, the newly elected leader of Austria's right- wing Freedom Party whose views have been likened to the Nazis, is far different: "He must be repudiated. The whole world must show that we won't tolerate this type of ideology." (Mr. Haider has since resigned as his party's chairman.) Growing Up as a Black Kid in Nazi Germany. In 1933, a young Hans J. Massaquoi stood in a schoolyard in Hamburg, wearing a swastika patch on his sweater, surrounded by the load of fair- haired, blue-eyed kids, that you see in the photo above. Young Hans, the son of a German nurse and a Liberian diplomat, managed to survive under Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime. "I survived because of a loophole in racial laws. We weren't such a significant number so as to be noticed by the Nazis," wrote Massaquoi in his autobiography Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany . Germany's black population during the Nazi period was minimal—maybe a few thousand at most, among the 65 million people living in Germany at the time. Massaquoi was the grandson of the Liberian Consul in Germany, so his family was granted immunity and he was able to live among the Aryan population while anyone else considered by the Nazis to belong to an "inferior race" began to suffer the effects of Hitler's repressive, xenophobic policies. However, Massaquoi's life began to change in the summer of 1934. "When I came to school one beautiful summer morning in 1934, our third grade teacher informed the class that the principal had given instructions for all the students and teachers to gather at the schoolyard," he wrote. "Right there, dressed in the brown Nazi uniform I used to wear for special occasions, the principal announced that 'the most splendorous moment of our young lives' was about to come, that destiny had chosen us to be among the fortunate ones who would contemplate 'our beloved Führer' with their own eyes. That was a privilege, he assured us, that our yet to be born children, and our children's children, would envy in times to come. I was eight by then, and I didn't notice that, from the almost 600 kids gathered in that schoolyard, I was the only one Herr Wriede was not talking to." Massaquoi's schoolmates were seemingly so taken in by the Nazi leader's charisma that, after his visit, they all signed up to the Hitler Youth. Massaquoi didn't want to be left out, so he also applied to become a member. He was not accepted. A couple of years later, the xenophobic trend in German society became even more apparent. After African-American athlete Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, Hitler and the rest of the National Socialist fanatics ramped up their rejection of black people. Soon after this, Massaquoi's paternal family had to flee the country, while he remained in Germany with his mother. Hans as a child (left) and an adult (right). Photo via. But the nightmare had only just started. First, a notice placed on the swings of a park said "non-Aryan" kids were not allowed to play there. After that, teachers at school who were of Jewish origin began to disappear. But it wasn't until young Massaquoi visited the Hamburg Zoo that the emotional connection he had felt towards Nazism was finally severed. Inside the zoo, in a cage placed outdoors among the animals, he discovered an African family being laughed at and teased by the crowd. Massaquoi had been just another kid fearfully approaching the cage, until somebody stood out from the crowd, pointed at him and yelled cruelly: "They've had a child." That was the first time he had been the subject of public scorn. In order to survive the country's increasingly racist dogma, Massaquoi had to endure many insults to his person. Another peculiar episode in his life took place immediately after the beginning of the second world war. Massaquoi, who had been rejected by the Hitler Youth for being "unworthy to wear the German uniform," was on the brink of being recruited by the German Army, an irony not lost on him. However, he was spared because he was underweight. The end of the second world war led to another U-turn in Massaquoi's life. During the post-war period, he initially made a living working as a jazz saxophonist, and then emigrated to the United States with a brief stopover at Liberia—his father's homeland, where he was recruited by Uncle Sam to fight in the Korean War. After his time as a paratrooper in the American army, he attended the University of Illinois, where he graduated with a degree in journalism. He worked as a journalist for more than four decades and served as a managing editor of Ebony magazine, the legendary African-American publication. "All's well that ends well," Massaquoi writes. "I'm quite satisfied with the way my life has turned out to be. I survived to tell the piece of history I was a witness of. At the same time, I wish everyone could have a happy childhood within a fair society. And that was definitely not my case." What happened to black Germans under the Nazis? Eve Rosenhaft receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Partners. University of Liverpool provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation UK. The Conversation UK receives funding from these organisations. Email Twitter Facebook LinkedIn WhatsApp Messenger. The fact that we officially commemorate the Holocaust on January 27, the date of the liberation of Auschwitz, means that remembrance of Nazi crimes focuses on the systematic mass murder of Europe’s Jews. The other victims of Nazi racism, including Europe’s Sinti and Roma are now routinely named in commemoration, but not all survivors have had equal opportunities to have their story heard. One group of victims who have yet to be publicly memorialised is black Germans. All those voices need to be heard, not only for the sake of the survivors, but because we need to see how varied the expressions of Nazi racism were if we are to understand the lessons of the Holocaust for today. When Hitler came to power in 1933, there were understood to have been some thousands of black people living in Germany – they were never counted and estimates vary widely. At the heart of an emerging black community was a group of men from Germany’s own African colonies (which were lost under the peace treaty that ended World War I) and their German wives. They were networked across Germany and abroad by ties of family and association and some were active in communist and anti-racist organisations. Among the first acts of the Nazi regime was the suppression of black political activism. There were also 600 to 800 children fathered by French colonial soldiers – many, though not all, African – when the French army occupied the Rhineland as part of the peace settlement after 1919. French troops were withdrawn in 1930 and the Rhineland was demilitarised until Hitler stationed German units there in 1936. Denial of rights and work. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of their German citizenship and prohibited them from marrying or having sexual relations with “people of German blood”. A subsequent ruling confirmed that black people (like “gypsies”) were to be regarded as being “of alien blood” and subject to the Nuremberg principles. Very few people of African descent had German citizenship, even if they were born in Germany, but this became irreversible when they were given passports that designated them as “stateless negroes”. In 1941, black children were officially excluded from public schools, but most of them had suffered racial abuse in their classrooms much earlier. Some were forced out of school and none were permitted to go on to university or professional training. Published interviews and memoirs by both men and women, unpublished testimony and post-war compensation claims testify to these and other shared experiences. Employment prospects which were already poor before 1933 got worse afterwards. Unable to find regular work, some were drafted for forced labour as “foreign workers” during World War II. Films and stage shows making propaganda for the return of Germany’s African colonies became one of the few sources of income, especially after black people were banned from other kinds of public performance in 1939. Incarceration. When SS leader Heinrich Himmler undertook a survey of all black people in Germany and occupied Europe in 1942, he was probably contemplating a round-up of some kind. But there was no mass internment. The only physical memorial to a black concentration camp victim, the actor Bayume Mohamed Husen. OTFW, Berlin, Wikimedia.com, CC BY- SA. Research in camp records and survivor testimony has so far thrown up around 20 black Germans who spent time in concentration camps and prisons – and at least one who was a euthanasia victim. The one case we have of a black person being sent to a concentration camp explicitly for being a Mischling (mulatto) – Gert Schramm, interned in Buchenwald aged 15 – comes from 1944. Instead, the process that ended with incarceration usually began with a charge of deviant or antisocial behaviour. Being black made people visible to the police, and it became a reason not to release them once they were in custody. In this respect, we can see black people as victims not of a peculiarly Nazi racism, but of an intensified version of the kinds of everyday racism that persist today. Sterilisation: an assault on families. It was the Nazi fear of “racial pollution” that led to the most common trauma suffered by black Germans: the break-up of families. “Mixed” couples were harassed into separating. When others applied for marriage licences, or when a woman was known to be pregnant or had a baby, the black partner became a target for involuntary sterilisation. In a secret action in 1937, some 400 of the Rhineland children were forcibly sterilised. Other black Germans went into hiding or fled the country to escape sterilisation, while news of friends and relatives who had not escaped intensified the fear that dominated people’s lives. The black German community was new in 1933; in most families the first generation born in Germany was just coming of age. In that respect it was similar to the communities in France and Britain that were forming around families founded by men from the colonies. Nazi persecution broke those families and the ties of community. One legacy of that was a long silence about the human face of Germany’s colonial history: the possibility that black and white Germans could share a social and cultural space. That silence helps to explain Germans’ mixed responses to today’s refugee crisis. The welcome offered by German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and many ordinary Germans has given voice to the liberal humanitarianism that was always present in German society and was reinforced by the lessons of the Holocaust. The reaction against refugees reveals the other side of the coin: Germans who fear immigration are not alone in Europe. But their anxieties draw on a vision that has remained very powerful in German society since 1945: the idea that however deserving they are, people who are not white cannot be German. This article was corrected on January 27 to clarify the situation in the Rhineland between the two world wars. Afro-Germans during the Holocaust. Although the Nazis did not have an organized program to eliminate African Germans, many of them were persecuted, as were other people of African descent. Some Black people in Germany and German-occupied territories were isolated; an unknown number were sterilized, incarcerated or murdered. Key Facts. Persecution of Black people occurred despite their relatively small presence in Germany. Black people accounted for roughly 20,000 people out of an overall population of 65 million by 1933. The children of African soldiers serving with French troops and German women were viewed as a threat to the purity of the Germanic race. The Nazis referred to them as the “Rhineland Bastards.” Black people from other areas of Europe and America were also victimized by the Nazi regime after they were caught in German-occupied Europe during World War II or held as a prisoners of war. Twitter Facebook Cite Print. This content is available in the following languages. Afro-Germans before 1933. After World War I, the Allies stripped Germany of its African colonies. The German military stationed in Africa, known as the Schutztruppen, as well as missionaries, colonial bureaucrats, and settlers, returned to Germany with racist attitudes. Separation of white people and Black people 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 heightened 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.” Nazi Perceptions of People of African Descent. The Nazis, at the time a small political movement, viewed the “Rhineland Bastards” as a threat to the purity of the Germanic race. In his autobiography, 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 (a person of mixed white and Black ancestry) 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 had secretly rounded up and forcibly sterilized many of them. Some were subjected to medical experiments; others mysteriously “disappeared.” Influence of Black Artists in Culture. 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. In the early 1920s, African American jazz artists could not break through the racial divide in the US, so they took to Europe where they could perform with ever-growing popularity. The cultural movement of this music threatened the expansion of Nazi ideology, which held this music to be immoral. By the mid-1930s Nazi authorities banned all foreign, non-Aryan music in Germany, but the campaign to rid the country of jazz did not stop American artists from going abroad to share their art. The portrait 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. Black Prisoners of War. Black Europeans and Americans were also interned in the Nazi concentration camp system. 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. After battling for freedoms and defending democracy worldwide, African American soldiers returned home in 1945 only to find themselves faced with the existing prejudice and “Jim Crow” laws. Despite segregation in the military at the time, more than one million African Americans were fighting for the US Armed Forces on the homefront, in Europe, and in the Pacific by 1945. Some African American members of the US 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, US 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.