Remembering Afro-Germans under Nazi

On secret orders Afro-Germans were tracked down by the Gestapo

When came to power in 1933, there were thousands of black people living in Germany. Many of the Blacks were from Germany’s African colonies (which were lost under the peace treaty that ended World War I). At the heart of the emerging lack community were Afro-German children from Africans who were married to Germans.

During the war, German propaganda had often attacked the French for deploying African soldiers to fight in Europe, claiming that black men were innately savage and barbaric, and it was unacceptable for the French to use Senegalese soldiers in Europe as it"endangered" European civilization.

Although Germany had also recruited soldiers in its African colonies both before and during World War I, the Allied blockade prevented any Askaris from fighting in Europe for Germany. Under the terms of the armistice which ended the fighting on the Western Front on 11November 1918, the Allies had the right to occupy the Rhineland, and during the negotiations the Germans had specifically demanded that no African troops be included in the French occupation force.

Concerns were raised about the subsequent arrival of African troops in the Rhineland, first a regiment from Madagascar, and then the first Senegalese unit in May 1919. The"colored" troops in the Rhineland were conscripts from Algeria,Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, Madagascar, and French Indochina. At their peak, the"colored" soldiers were 14% of the French occupation force in the Rhineland.

A year before Hitler stationed German units in the Rhineland, the 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of their German citizenship and prohibited them from marrying or having sexual relations with “people of German blood”, in other words mixed marriages were banned.

Among the first acts of the Nazi regime was the suppression of black political activism. 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 1937, mixed race children living in the Rhineland were tracked down by the Gestapo. Black children in Hitler’s Germany 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.

On secret order, these children were pulled from school, off the streets and bundled into vans, taken to medical facilities and sterilized. Some were later the subject of medical experiments, while others vanished.

Nazi obsession with racial purity led to the Holocaust.

While anti-Semitism occupied a pre-eminent place at the heart of Nazi ideology, aline in Mein Kampf, the book published in 1925 outlining the political beliefs of party leader Adolf Hitler, linked Jewish and black people. "It was and is the Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland," Hitler wrote,"always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization." Evidence shows Third Reich policies toward "other 'racial aliens' hint toward a goal of racial annihilationism".

Once in power, the Nazis' obsession with Jews and racial purity gradually led to the Holocaust, the industrialized slaughter of six million Jewish people during World War II, as well as the mass murder of Roma, people with disabilities and some of the Slavic peoples who will all be remembered in UNCM.

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Although what happened to the majority of Afro-Germans under the Nazi regime is unknown, and the only recorded part of their story was buried for so long, UNCM will call the world to acknowledgement, and commemorate the victims.